January 01, 2004 May the Waters Be With You With roots stretching back over a millennium, the Russian banya (steam bath) is stitched tightly into the fabric of the Russian soul. We asked an intrepid journalist to help us unravel the mysteries, and sent him on a tour of Moscow's finest public bani.
January 01, 2014 Yanukovich Takes a Banya The Ukraine-Russia-EU fracas had this columnist thinking about banyas and banya language...
September 01, 2005 To Bathe or Not to Bathe Our neighbor Kalkan has probably been clean and sober only a dozen times in his life. The last time he bathed in a barrel of water warmed in a wood stove he came down with a bad cold and vowed never to do it again.
September 01, 2017 Bath Day in Sheshurino “On Saturdays, smoke drifts over the village. The banyas are being heated.” Let’s go!
May 21, 2021 Security Snoops on Banya Bathers A court case in the city of Perm unveils a story combining three quintessentially Soviet things: bathhouses, religious oppression, and an (extremely) intrusive surveillance state.
January 01, 2020 Happy New Year! Enjoy Your Bath! Russian Life wishes you a happy new year, complete with movies and marriages.
Far & Away ~ Tales from Rural Russia 33 original stories about modern (and not so modern) life in rural Russia.
93 Untranslatable Russian Words Every language has concepts, ideas, words and idioms that are nearly impossible to translate into another language. This book looks at nearly 100 such Russian words and offers paths to their understanding and translation by way of examples from literature and everyday life. Difficult to translate words and concepts are introduced with dictionary definitions, then elucidated with citations from literature, speech and prose, helping the student of Russian comprehend the word/concept in context.
Resilience: Life Stories of Centenarians Born in the Year of Revolution Call it resilience, grit, or just perseverance – it takes a special sort of person to have survived the last 100 years of Russian and Soviet history.
The Pet Hawk of the House of Abbas This exciting new trilogy by a Russian author – who has been compared to Orhan Pamuk and Umberto Eco – vividly recreates a lost world, yet its passions and characters are entirely relevant to the present day. Full of mystery, memorable characters, and non-stop adventure, The Pet Hawk of the House of Abbas is a must read for lovers of historical fiction and international thrillers.
The Frogs Who Begged for a Tsar (bilingual) The fables of Ivan Krylov are rich fonts of Russian cultural wisdom and experience – reading and understanding them is vital to grasping the Russian worldview. This new edition of 62 of Krylov’s tales presents them side-by-side in English and Russian. The wonderfully lyrical translations by Lydia Razran Stone are accompanied by original, whimsical color illustrations by Katya Korobkina.
Kashtanka – A Bilingual Reader A bilingual presentation of one of the great classics of Russian literature.
A Taste of Chekhov This compact volume is an introduction to the works of Chekhov the master storyteller, via nine stories spanning the last twenty years of his life.
Turgenev Bilingual A sampling of Ivan Turgenev's masterful short stories, plays, novellas and novels. Bilingual, with English and accented Russian texts running side by side on adjoining pages.
Woe From Wit (bilingual) One of the most famous works of Russian literature, the four-act comedy in verse Woe from Wit skewers staid, nineteenth century Russian society, and it positively teems with “winged phrases” that are essential colloquialisms for students of Russian and Russian culture.
White Magic The thirteen tales in this volume – all written by Russian émigrés, writers who fled their native country in the early twentieth century – contain a fair dose of magic and mysticism, of terror and the supernatural. There are Petersburg revenants, grief-stricken avengers, Lithuanian vampires, flying skeletons, murders and duels, and even a ghostly Edgar Allen Poe.
Dostoyevsky Bilingual Bilingual series of short, lesser known, but highly significant works that show the traditional view of Dostoyevsky as a dour, intense, philosophical writer to be unnecessarily one-sided.
The Latchkey Murders Senior Lieutenant Pavel Matyushkin is back on the case in this prequel to the popular mystery Murder at the Dacha, in which a serial killer is on the loose in Khrushchev’s Moscow...
