Recommendations based on "Glory"

‘It is best to do nothing! The best thing is conscious inertia! So long live the underground!’Alienated from society and paralysed by a sense of his own insignificance, the anonymous narrator of Dostoyevsky’s groundbreaking Notes from Underground tells the story of his tortured life. With bitter sarcasm, he describes his refusal to become a worker in the ‘ant-hill’ of society and his gradual withdrawal to an existence ‘underground’. The seemingly ordinary world of St Petersburg takes on a nightmarish quality in The Double when a government clerk encounters a man who exactly resembles him – his double perhaps, or possibly the darker side of his own personality. Like Notes from Underground, this is a masterly study of human consciousness.Jessie Coulson’s introduction discusses the stories’ critical reception and the themes they share with Dostoyevksy’s great novels.

One hot spring the devil makes a personal appearance in Moscow accompanied by various demons, including a naked girl and a huge black cat. When he leaves, the asylums are full and the forces of law and order in disarray. Only the Master, a man devoted to truth, and Margarita, the woman he loves, can resist the devil's onslaught.(back cover)

In these stories, Dostoevsky explores both the figure of the dreamer divorced from reality, and also his own ambiguous attitude toward utopianism, themes central to his great novels. In White Nights, the apparent idyll of the dreamer's romantic fantasies disguises profound loneliness and estrangement from "living life." A Gentle Creature and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man show how withdrawal from reality can end in spiritual desolation as well as moral indifference, and how, in Dostoevsky's view, the tragedy of the alienated individual can only be resolved by the rediscovery of a sense of compassion and responsibility toward other people.No other edition brings together these specific stories--which are most interesting when read alongside one another--and the new translations capture all the power and lyricism of Dostoevsky's writing at its best.

'Although he feared death, he could not stop. 'If I stopped now, after coming all this way - well, they'd call me an idiot!' A pair of short stories about greed, charity, life and death from one of Russia's most influential writers and thinkers. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910). Tolstoy's works available in Penguin Classics are Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth,The Cossacks and Other Stories, The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories, What is art?, Resurrection, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories, Master and Man and Other Stories, How Much Land Does A Man Need? & Other Stories, A Confession and Other Religious Writings and Last steps: The Late Writings of Leo Tolstoy.

Bringing together six of Turgenev's best known stories in one volume, this collection includes "First Love," "Asya," "Mumu," "The Diary of a Superfluous Man," "Song of Triumphant Love," and "King Lear of the Steppes."

Andrey Tarkovsky, the genius of modern Russian cinema—hailed by Ingmar Bergman as "the most important director of our time"—died an exile in Paris in December 1986. In Sculpting in Time, he has left his artistic testament, a remarkable revelation of both his life and work. Since Ivan's Childhood won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1962, the visionary quality and totally original and haunting imagery of Tarkovsky's films have captivated serious movie audiences all over the world, who see in his work a continuation of the great literary traditions of nineteenth-century Russia. Many critics have tried to interpret his intensely personal vision, but he himself always remained inaccessible.In Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky sets down his thoughts and his memories, revealing for the first time the original inspirations for his extraordinary films—Ivan's Childhood, Andrey Rublyov, Solaris, The Mirror, Stalker, Nostalgia, and The Sacrifice. He discusses their history and his methods of work, he explores the many problems of visual creativity, and he sets forth the deeply autobiographical content of part of his oeuvre—most fascinatingly in The Mirror and Nostalgia. The closing chapter on The Sacrifice, dictated in the last weeks of Tarkovsky's life, makes the book essential reading for those who already know or who are just discovering his magnificent work.

Of all Russian writers, Chekhov is one of the best liked and most easily appreciated. Yet he is also one of the most elusive. Here Donald Rayfield reveals the layers of meaning on which the great dramatist's stories and plays are built. He examines his brief twenty-year creative life, from medical student supplementing his income by writing comic stories to his rapid rise as the father of twentieth-century drama and narrative prose. Understanding Chekhov is enriched by revelations from previously unexplored archival material, which deepen our understanding of Chekhov's sources, preoccupations, philosophy, and his relations with theater, with fellow writers, and with contemporary ideas.

The text of The Brothers Karamazov is removed from English-speaking readers today not only by time but also by linguistic and cultural boundaries. Victor Terras’s companion work provides readers with a richer understanding of the Dostoevsky novel as the expression of a philosophy and a work of art.In his introduction, Terras outlines the genesis, main ideas, and structural peculiarities of the novel as well as Dostoevsky’s political, philosophical, and aesthetic stance. The detailed commentary takes the reader through the novel, clarifying aspects of Russian life, the novel’s sociopolitical background, and a number of polemic issues. Terras identifies and explains hundreds of literary and biblical quotations and allusions. He discusses symbols, recurrent images, and structural stylistic patterns, including those lost in English translation.

The first state in history to be based explicitly on atheism, the Soviet Union endowed itself with the attributes of God. In this book, David Satter shows through individual stories what it meant to construct an entire state on the basis of a false idea, how people were forced to act out this fictitious reality, and the tragic human cost of the Soviet attempt to remake reality by force.“I had almost given up hope that any American could depict the true face of Russia and Soviet rule. In David Satter’s Age of Delirium, the world has received a chronicle of the calvary of the Russian people under communism that will last for generations.”―Vladimir Voinovich, author of The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin“Spellbinding. . . . Gives one a visceral feel for what it was like to be trapped by the communist system.”―Jack Matlock, Washington Post“Satter deserves our gratitude. . . . He is an astute observer of people, with an eye for essential detail and for human behavior in a universe wholly different from his own experience in America.”―Walter Laqueur, Wall Street Journal“Every page of this splendid and eloquent and impassioned book reflects an extraordinarily acute understanding of the Soviet system.”―Jacob Heilbrunn, Washington Times

The acclaimed author of Lolita offers unique insight into works by James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Jane Austen, and others—with an introduction by John Updike.In the 1940s, when Vladimir Nabokov first embarked on his academic career in the United States, he brought with him hundreds of original lectures on the authors he most admired. For two decades those lectures served as the basis for Nabokov’s teaching, first at Wellesley and then at Cornell, as he introduced undergraduates to the delights of great fiction.This volume collects Nabokov’s famous lectures on Western European literature, with analysis and commentary on Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Marcel Proust’s The Walk by Swann’s Place, Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” and other works.Edited and with a Foreword by Fredson Bowers.