Bøger om Rusland

Life in the modernist era not only moved, it sped. As automobiles, airplanes, and motion pictures, among other technological advances, proliferated at the turn of the twentieth century, speed transformed contemporary reality, generating new possibilities not only for everyday existence, but also for modernist culture. From Manhattan to Milan to Moscow, the rise of modernism coincided with a precipitous acceleration in the pace of human experience that may artists celebrated. Speed was soon aestheticized and converted from an ordinary, physical concept into a unique source of inspiration. Although modernism arrived somewhat late in Russia, the increased tempo of life at the start of the twentieth century provided Russia's avant-garde movement with an infusion of creative dynamism and crucial momentum for its revolutionary experimentation. Fast Forward: The Aesthetics and Ideology of Speed in Russian Avant-Garde Culture, 1910-1930 presents a detailed examination of the ideas and images of speed that permeated Russian modernist poetry, painting, and cinema. In probing this cultural phenomenon, which began in the early 1910s and continued to the late 1920s when formal innovation in the arts was overtaken by Stalin's Five-Year Plans for rapid Soviet industrialization, Fast Forward explores how the idea of speed propelled the nation's arts toward abstraction as well as toward the ideal of a dynamic, streamlined future. Speed, used as a powerful conceptual means for breaking down the figurative stasis of traditional representational art, provided the basis for a comprehensive reevaluation of everyday reality. Fostering a broad understanding of velocity, Russian avant-garde poets, painters, and filmmakers raced to establish a new artistic and social reality.

Stravinsky's influence on Debussy in 1910-13 is demonstrated here in the many modernistic features of such works as the Preludes Book II, Khamma, and Jeux.

The book includes interpretations that offer an alternative reading of Nabokov's texts, looking for the inner connections of the writer's oeuvre, in the microstructures of motifs, nodes, and patterns. The concept of the erotext, combining the bliss of the textual and the sexual detaches analyses from reading literature as a copy of life. Nabokov's paths of initiation lead the reader to transcend boundaries: facets of Ego and of imaginary norms, the limits of space and time, to the threshold of the otherworldly -- towards ecstasy. Being a polyglot writer with synaesthesia, he savored words, knew their physics and music, visualized word forms, blended hybrid languages. By indulging in associations, he brought things to life, and exposed the vulgarity of 'Communazist clowns'. Shifts reveal hidden layers, maintain tensions, and create new qualities. This shift can be understood in terms of the identity in the crisis of exile, multilinguality and synesthesia of the author, the provocation of ethics and eroticism, mirroring multiplications and dreams, and the loosening of the role of the author. In the shifts shattering the foundations of normativity Nabokov, the forerunner of the Postmodern is revealed.

Most famous as a literary artist, Vladimir Nabokov was also a professional biologist and a lifelong student of science. By exploring the refractions of physics, psychology, and biology within his art and thought, The Quill and the Scalpel: Nabokov's Art and the Worlds of Science,by Stephen H. Blackwell, demonstrates how aesthetic sensibilities contributed to Nabokov's scientific work, and how his scientific passions shape, inform, and permeate his fictions

The path to modernity was late in Russia, and as the country, absorbing western thought and art at a gallop, hurried to catch up in the nineteenth century, it produced cultural content about the modern individual unmatched in any other society. While in the process of creating Russian psychological prose in its mature form, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy converse through their texts. Behind the scenes, they criticize each other, but also grow their own prose in response to each other. Through close readings and other means, this book lays bare conversations about childhood, evil, and other themes. All three writers explore how self-examination changes us and has negative as well as positive effects.

George Kennan was an American journalist and adventurer, who traveled to Siberia in the late 1800s to investigate how Russian criminals and dissidents were punished with exile to remote lands.By the time Kennan traversed the Siberian countryside, villages and towns, Russia's exile system had existed for several decades. His researches demonstrate how common the use of exile as punishment was in Russia; some were exiled due to serious crimes, while others were sent to Siberia for petty offences, or for expressing political opinions. Various intellectuals and creatively talented persons such as the author Dostoyevsky and the philosopher Pyotr Kropotkin spent time in Siberian exile.The remote country of Siberia is depicted as both beautiful and merciless; many convicts suffered immensely in dreadful conditions, struggling with hunger and cold. The climate was frequently harsh and residences commonly squalid or even ramshackle. Despite the often dire circumstances, a culture arose among the exiles; many - especially the politically inclined - were educated and cultured, and would hold impromptu debates upon various subjects. Kennan also examines the native populations such as the Cossacks in great detail, alongside settlements such as Omsk, Tomsk and Pavlodar.

Die Politik der Bundesregierung im Ukrainekrieg ist symptomatisch für das Versagen der politischen Klasse der BRD, die sich auf nahezu allen Politikfeldern in Teufelskreise begeben hat, aus denen sie nicht mehr herausfindet, und die immer gefährlichere Dimensionen annehmen.Manfred Kleine-Hartlage analysiert die selbstzerstörerische Dynamik dieser Politik am Beispiel der Außenpolitik, aber unter Einbeziehung der seit spätestens 2010 kumulierten Großkrisen, also der Kombination aus Währungs-, Wirtschafts-, Energie-, Migrations-, Sicherheits- und Verfassungskrise.Die Außenpolitik im Ukrainekrieg ist ein weiteres Glied in einer Kette von Fehlentscheidungen, deren Wirkungen sich wechselseitig potenzieren, zugleich aber denkbare Lösungswege verbauen. Die pathologische Lernunfähigkeit der politischen Klasse führt dazu, dass ihr Mangel an Problemlösungskompetenz mit jeder Krise deutlicher hervortritt, sie diesen Sachverhalt aber nicht wahrhaben will und darf und ihr daher Heil in autoritärem Auftrumpfen und der Diffamierung ihrer Kritiker sucht.Dieses Buch wurde im Frühjahr 2022 verfasst, wird aber über den Ukrainekrieg hinaus als Lehrbeispiel für Politikversagen seine Gültigkeit behalten.

The Romance of the Romanoffs, a classical and rare book that has been considered essential throughout human history, so that this work is never forgotten, we at Alpha Editions have made efforts in its preservation by republishing this book in a modern format for present and future generations. This whole book has been reformatted, retyped and designed. These books are not made of scanned copies of their original work and hence the text is clear and readable.

In Spymaster’s Prism, the legendary spymaster Jack Devine aims to ignite public discourse on our country’s intelligence, covert action, and counterintelligence posture against Russia.