"Ashana" is a beautiful, powerful novel ... this little-remembered clash of cultures and peoples is brought to life with startling precision thanks to Roesch's haunting prose and eye for detail. Buy this book!

Jeg leste boka mens jeg var i Australia. Denne boka er ikke å oppdrive i Norge, det burde den bli. En helt fantastisk opplevelse å lese denne boka.

This book covers the now vanished world of Russian exiles from the Revolution till the 1950-60's. It covers such areas as the influence of the Ballets Russies in Paris prior to the revolution, the clothes the exiles bought with themselves, and the importance of the Kokoshnik to Russian fashion design.

We are also given the history of the now vanished Russian émigré communities in Constantinople in Turkey, Berlin in Germany and Harbin in China, with a smaller amount of discussion of the communities in Paris and London.

London and Paris mostly get discussed in context with fashion, as many émigrés, both noble and poor made a living in the various parts of the fashion industry in exile. There is a whole chapter devoted to the house of Kitmr with its exquisite embroideries and beading, which was run by Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna the younger in the 1920's.

The author has also unearthed other Russian émigré fashion houses which were well known and respected in the 1920's but are mostly forgotten now, houses such as Anely, Mode, Paul Caret, Tao, Yteb and Irfe which was run by the Youssoupoff family.

The majority of the book concentrates on fashion, but there is also discussion of the theatre, cafe's and other craft oriented activities which the Russian communities produced, especially in the 1920's. Many years of painstaking research as been conducted by the author to reconstruct this lost world. The book is full of black and white photos, which I imagine would not have been easy to find. However, if you are looking for nice colour photos of Russian costume, you will not find it here, but if you are trying to find something out on the background on émigré communities or the Russian fashion industry in the 1920's this book will be the standard work for many years to come.

An appraisal of European culture from an old maid somewhere in Western Kentucky knits a ludicrously inappropriate Horatio Algerish review to satisfy her puritan work ethos, that went out of date with the blue collar culture of 50's America, Honeymooners, Flintstones etc. She could be Pat Buchanans speech writer.

Pushkin greatest renoun is based on his poetry. But I like his short stories very much. They are crisp, intriguing, and educational. These stories are a treasure of Russian literature. They combine mystery and realism, persuasive language and simplicity--all trademarks of Pushkin's genius.

Pushkin is Mozart of Russian verse, prose and drama. That sounds like banality to any Russian but may help a person outside of our literary tradition to deal with the Russia's greatest writer.

Small, less than handsome misfit in a constant and direct dialog with the Muses. A man whose social, financial and matrimonial achievements are no match to his art.

His talents bloomed in the Lyceum, he was hailed by the most prominent poet of Russian Classicism - Gavrila Derzhavin, who had appointed the youngster his poetical heir.

But Pushkin made only a few contributions to the genre - he was a devoted romantic, a Byronite. Mermaids, gypsies and noble robber brothers were the inhabitants of his adolescent poems.

Drinking bouts with local Hussar officers were toppled by the boy's passionate odes to Liberty. Alexander was a celebrity guest.

The guest he remained. The officers - The Decembrists - rebelled against the tsar. Puskin was not invited. The conspirators felt that "the son of the Muses" is fond of the revolutionary rhetorics, not the cause.

Later, asked by the triumphant monarch does he regret his absence in rebellious ranks on that fateful December day, Pushkin confirmed his affinity with his hanged friends. He wanted to be taking seriously, he was ready to suffer. But the tsar was only amused and let Alexander go.

Pushkin soared high in empirea, the verse of unbelievable beauty and clarity was streaming from his quill, but his everyday life was dominated by gambling, drinking and chasing the known libertines. Yearning to be accepted socially he offered his friendship to unworthy and very often had to contend with their condescending attitude. He was not the first socially awkward creator in human history but that understanding did nothing to lessen the pain.

In his final years Pushkin decided to settle down, to accept the responsibilities, to marry, to get the position in the tsar's court.

Natalia Goncharova, the first beauty of Petersburg, consented to marry him - her family was impoverished, Alexander - insistent. He was given the court rank - kamerjunker, nearly the lowest in the hierarchy, fit for a very young man making his very first steps in the court. He was insulted but the wife's acclaimed beauty compensated for that and the other disapointments. They all envy him - the lucky man!

There was never enough money to put that gem in a proper setting. The beauty was expecting her due. If Alexander is incapable there are others.

Art remained the only consolation. Once he woke up in the middle of the night, put on a light and fevereshly scribbled the newborn lines. He read them to the wife. - Don't you ever do that to me again! - said the sleepy beauty.

His art is not able to conquer that perfection, the beauty of verse is nothing to the beauty of flesh.

Pushkin is made fun of, proclaimed a cuckold. His life is nearing the end.

In his last year the tortured genius writes Captain's Daughter. No mermaids here, no gypsies. It's clarity and restrained beauty is unsurpassed in our literature.

A son of old officer Petr Andreevich Grinev turns seventeen. He is enlisted as a toddler in a prestigeous regiment in Petersburg, now he is an officer already. He has no extensive education - just the basic ideas of nobility and some knowledge of French. His name is telling - Petr means a stone, father's name - a man, a male. The father wants to keep the son unspoiled - Petr is refused his ticket to the Petersburg. He goes to the steppes instead, to the fortress in the middle of nowhere.

On the way he gets drunk, loses money, suffers from hangover, abuses his old servant - with no harm to his inner integrity.

He begins to enjoy the simple life in the fortress, captain's daughter is aware if his feelings and seems to feel the same way. Short and ugly comrade-in-arms, Alexei Shvabrin envies him and speaks dirty of the girl. Duel puts Petr in a bed. The love flourishes.

All that a prelude to the Russian rebellion, "senseless and merciless".

The fortress is taken, the captain is hanged, his wife lies naked and dead in a dirt. Petr's life is spared on impostor's whim. Masha, the captain's daughter, is hidden in the local priest's house. Shvabrin is appointed the fortress commander and has the girl who rejected him in his power.

All will end well. The young lovers are ready to sacrifice, their love will conquer all, the empress Ekaterina is merciful - just like her adversary "emperor" Pugachev.

Like a drowning man gasping for air Pushkin had to get in contact with the qualities his life is so utterlly lacking - integrity, loyalty,love accepted and given back. He had experienced all that in Captain's Daughter.

No matter what happens Petr Grinev is true to his nature - the quality respected by friends and enemies. He is always ready to do the right thing - no matter what's the price. There are things more important than life. Or love.

Puskin's life is over, he is not respected, not loved by the woman he chose. So he escapes in art, lives another life, the dream of life he never had.

Less talented writer would have succumbed to the pure escapism, but Alexander Pushkin is a genius, what we have instead is a timeless masterpiece, clear and restrained, very modern prose, the characters we care about. No one succeed in imitating that style.

Puskin is not very well known in the West. The verse is so Russian it defies a translation, the prose is deceptively simple - it's very different from "prophetic" writings of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, the export variant of The Great Late Russian Literature. The reader used to contemplating "the mysterious Russian soul" will be disappointed.

I am reluctant to recommend that book to a Western reader.But Pushkin is one of the reasons I still live here.

I've bought this book as a gift to my English-speaking friend and was very impressed with the translation. It is so close to the Russian original. I also like that the books includes fairly tales - excellent reading for kids.

After finding this book, I found it difficult to put down. Translating Russian poetry is a challenge indeed, and most translators will make mention of that, but Arndt does not. I have read the original Russian of most of these works, as well as several attempts (all unsuccessful) to translate Pushkin, and this is the first time that any person has been able to successfully render its depth and character in English. If you like good poetry, but can't read Russian, then this is the book you will want, and treasure for years to come.

"Eugene Onegin" was the first major work written in Russian, helping to establish that language's illustrious literary tradition. This novel in verse brought to fame Aleksandr Pushkin, who later turned his talents from poetry on to prose fiction with such titles as "The Captain's Daughter", "The Queen of Spades", and "Dubrovskii".

Briefly, the story concerns the encounter between two landed gentry, Eugene, who is disillusioned by his former experiences of St. Petersburg, and Tatyana, a provincial girl who sees the world through her English romance poetry. Obviously, the meeting is an ugly one. The ending is left for the reader to discover, but we all get to see how pitiful Onegin really is.

This edition includes the unfinished poem, "Onegin's Journey", and the classic "The Bronze Horseman", which is famous for describing the unstoppable and cruel will of Peter the Great in modernizing Russia.

The only problem that I had was in the English translation of "Eugene Onegin". Translating a poem from one lanaguage to another, while still maintaining proper meter and rhyme is no mean feat. Nevertheless, something is lost in the delivery of the poem and unfortunately, we can appreciate only part of Pushkin's genius by reading the English translation. I'd like to learn Russian well enough to be able to read Pushkin's poetry in order to appreciate his work more fully. Well I'm working on it!

once you get in this book you get lost in depth of their characters like yevgeni onegin and tanya.I have really developed a great admiration for the write a.s.pushkin of how he played with the characters in some way ý beleive that y.onegin was himself and tanya was his one of those gales that writer flirted with them in a sensual way.

ý am pretty sure the writer had a deep sensual feeling for tanya and was trying to put her in a role at his wife's position where she was never ever had a sexual object in his real lifetime marriage with her.

ý have seen the theatrical play of this book and enjoyed very much so as ý had the pleasure of reading it.

James Falen's translation of this Russian classic is the best I have been able to find. Other translations by other Americans are nowhere near Falen's accuracy; on the other hand, Nabokov's rendition of the epic poem omits the most important part of Pushkin's masterpiece -- the iambic pentameter familiar to all Russians. James Falen combines the accuracy and the poetry to produce the best translation of Eugene Onegin available to an American reader.

Reading Eugene Onegin was my first taste of poetry outside of school. The experience was wonderful. Although the idea of deciphering a novel in verse was certainly somewhat daunting at first, especially with no guidance provided by a teacher, I discovered that I enjoyed Pushkin's poetry, which seemed so perfectly balanced even translated into English. I was sorry when it ended.

It is a summary of what a laser crystal or better a rare heart doping material could do. Special solution on particular wavelength could be found on this book.

The book "Laser Crystals" is dealing with the basic properties of doped single crystals. Stark level splittings, some (low resolution) spectras, any demonstrated laser transition (with temperatures) gives a survey of this topic, some new materials and dopands are not included (published 89), over 900 references! Unfortunately out of stock.END

A Y Khinchin was one of the great mathematicians of the first half of the twentieth century. His name is is already well-known to students of probability theory along with A N Kolmogorov and others from the host of important theorems, inequalites, constants named after them. He was also famous as a teacher and communicator. The books he wrote on Mathematical Foundations of Information Theory, Statistical Mechanics and Quantum Statistics are still in print in English translations, published by Dover. Like William Feller and Richard Feynman he combines a complete mastery of his subject with an ability to explain clearly without sacrificing mathematical rigour.

In his "Mathematical Foundations" books Khinchin develops a sound mathematical structure for the subject under discussion based on the modern theory of probability. His primary reason for doing this is the lack of mathematically rigorous presentation in many textbooks on these subjects.

This book contains two papers written by Khinchin on the concept of entropy in probability theory and Shannon's first and second theorems in information theory - with detailed modern proofs. Like all Khinchin's books, this one is very readable. And unlike many recent books on this subject the price is very cheap. Two minor complaints are: lack of an index, and typesetting could be improved.

Shannon's paper is great. Easy to read (though many people misunderstand many concepts - I may too) but lacks mathematical rigor. This book has redone several points that Shannon made but more accurately. It requires ergodic theory and measure theory to follow every detail, but some parts may be usable even without much background. I don't think the book is perfectly edited, but I know I paid too little for the knowledge I gained from this book.

This is the best piece of literary criticism I have read on a Russian author, and definitely one of the best pieces in lit studies in general. Greenleaf is sophisticated yet remarkably clear and persuasive. And the book is not just useful for readers of Pushkin; I would argue that any lit student should read some of this, to get a sense of how genre figures into literary analysis. I loved it.

This book received major awards from both the modern language association (MLA) and the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. It is best described by the citation from the MLA judges: "In a volume whose elegant style and civilized irony are a loving critical tribute to Russia's 'national poet,' Monika Greenleaf confronts Pushkin's protean nature with exhaustive comparative research, independent- minded recourse to contemporary critical theory, unfailing fairness to her scholarly predecessors, and a sharp eye for the details and patterns of Pushkin's major and minor texts. Her notion of 'self-portraiture' allows her to join readings of Pushkin's work, culture, and biography together in a subtle, persuasive whole that is sure to be a landmark in Russian studies for years to come."

very interesting look on russian history.
much more compeling then "official" version.
would be great to translate to english

After years of meticulous research and field work, one of Russia's most prolific genre writers challenges the traditional version of the Russian history. A Russia That Was Not is a true eye-opener, as Bushkov's no-nonsense, logical approach to many events and mysteries of the past leads him and the reader to conclusions that disagree with the official side of story! Was Russia initially indeed a Catholic country? Would the decembrists' "liberating" conspiracy propel the country into the nightmare of a ruthless dictatorship? And did Peter the Great really have to introduce the supposedly three-centuries-behind-their-time Russians to the western lifestyle?

Yet another version of the Russian history, but written with so much wit and insight it just might happen to be accurate!