I read this book several months ago. I have thought about writing a review many times and have wanted to because it is such a wonderful book. The feeling of being unable to express the book's effect on me has been the cause of the delay. It is a beautiful, heart-wrenching and powerful story and that is all that I will say, because the experience is personal and rewarding.

I dont know how to explain my feeling regarding this book. What I can say is that it changed my life. It made me fall in love. It was the most surprising experience I have ever had... I stop here and let the other live their own experience while they are reading this book.

Aitmatov was always my favorite writer. I read almost all of his books in russian. But this is the first one I read in english. I would say, translation was excellent. This book describes ordinary working kazakh people in Sarozek, Kazakhstan. Aitmatov masterfully connects their life with the political situations as well as kazakh traditions. Aitmatov describes humanity and dignity of ordinary people who are unaware of what is going on at the space station. His SF with aliens and discovery of a new planet only enrich the main story, let readers think of humanity, role of human being, meaning of life. I would suggest to read this book everybody. You will discover Aitmatov as one of greatest writers of modern day.

This is the only Biography of Mikhail Bakhtin available in English. Published in 1984, it is now outdated, but it is still worth reading for those interested in Bakhtin and his work. The Biography more or less follows the chronological order of his life, and therefore is helpful in placing his work in a particular time. This is important because the English Translations, especially the Essay compilations, "Dialogic Imagination" and "Speech Genres and other Late Essays", tend to mix work from diferent periods in his life. Bakhtin's thought changed and developed in his life, and this Biography helps make sense of this. Actual details and anecdotes of Bakhtin's life, that help putting a "man behind the work", are disappointingly scant. The reader will not learn much about what Bakhtin actually did outside his work in this Literary Biography. Most of all, I would have been interested in his reading likes, as well as dislikes, and his opinions of Authors and Literary Theorists. Otherwise, this Biogrpahy is well written and researched, but now out of date. For Bakhtin studies a new Biography is neded, and even more importantly a Critical Edition of his work.

Katerina Clark has written this study of the artistic and cultural history of St Petersburg from the pre-revolutionary era through the ascendency of Stalin. It's quite a rigoursly academic book, so much so that at times it's a bit stilted in that formal post-modern academic language popular among a certain generation of historians.

And that is unfortunate. Clark has done her homework well, her topic is an interesting one as is the theme she develops.

Unlike Volkov's "St Petersburg a Cultural History", Clark show's the artists and writers on Nevsky Prospect were excited about the prospects of revolution under Bolshevism. And, for a few short years, avante garde plays, paintings, music and writing blossomed promoting the Bolshevik cause. But under growing hand of Stalinism it gradually became a tool to assist in his own particular vision of socialism in one country.

Clark doesn't let the artists off the hook. Unlike many cold war historians of the Conquest/Pipes variety, she shows a social group, complicite and active in varying degrees in the formation of the one party state. The same state that under Stalin destroyed them.

This is difficult reading at times- hampered by the PoMo academic writing style- and is deeply thought out (it probably requires more than a passing interest in Russian history.) Very important for students and layspersons interested in an overlooked area the Soviet era.