The Russia Reader: History, Culture, Politics

£20.99 BUY

In Stock

  • Author: Adele Barker, Bruce Grant
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • Catalogue: 189017
  • Size: 16x24cm
“The Russia Reader” is an indispensable introduction to the history, culture and politics of this vast and varied land. It brings together the letters of ordinary Russians reacting to the 1917 Revolution, excerpts from a sixteenth-century manual instructing elite Muscovites on proper household management and many other selections covering the earliest written records to the experiences of the Russian people today. Most of these have also been translated into English for the first time.

Illustrated with maps, paintings, photographs, posters, and cartoons, “The Russia Reader” incorporates song, lyrics, jokes, anecdotes, and folktales, as well as poems, essays, and fiction by writers including Akhmatova, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, and Tolstoi. Transcripts from the show trials of major Party figures and an account of how staff at the Lenin Library in Moscow were instructed to interact with foreigners are among the many selections based on personal memoirs and archival materials only recently made available to the public.

From a tenth-century emissary’s description of his encounters in Kyivan Rus’, to a scientist’s recollections of her life in a new research city built from scratch in Siberia during the 1950s, to a novelist’s depiction of the decadence of the “New Russians” in the 2000s, “The Russian Reader” is an extraordinary introduction to this incredible country.

About the editors:

Adele Barker is Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at the University of Arizona.

Bruce Grant is Associate Professor of Anthropology at New York University.