The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess
The Posthuman Dada Guide is an impractical handbook for practical living in our posthuman world--all by way of examining the imagined 1916 chess game between Tristan Tzara, the daddy of Dada, and V. I. Lenin, the daddy of communism. This epic game at Zurich's Cafe de la Terrasse--a battle between radical visions of art and ideological revolution--lasted for a century and may still be going on, although communism appears dead and Dada stronger than ever. As the poet faces the future mass murderer over the chessboard, neither realizes that they are playing for the world.
Only introduction to the Russian Revolution to be written after the fall of Communism
New sources and archives made available since the fall of Communism are used as sources in Smith's introduction making most up-to date introduction available
Concise, accessible, and illustrated introduction to key moment in Soviet history
Treats all aspects and effects of the revolution, from political to social and economic developments
Controversial new perspectives, indicating the Bolsheviks had real choices and their decisions helped bring about Stalinism.
Added by: lucius5 | Karma: 1660.85 | Fiction literature | 11 February 2010
22
Animal Farm: 50th Anniversary Edition
Since its publication in 1946, George Orwell's fable of a workers' revolution gone wrong has rivaled Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea as the Shortest Serious Novel It's OK to Write a Book Report About. (The latter is three pages longer and less fun to read.) Fueled by Orwell's intense disillusionment with Soviet Communism, Animal Farm is a nearly perfect piece of writing, both an engaging story and an allegory that actually works.
Set in Leningrad in 1941 against Hitler's invasion of Russia, this story tells of the impossible love between a Russian girl, Tatiana, and a young officer named Alexander. It is a love that could tear Tatiana's family apart and it carries a secret that could mean death for anyone who hears it.
Shlapentokh undertakes a dispassionate analysis of the ordinary functioning of the Soviet system from Stalin's death through the Soviet collapse and Russia's first post-communist decade. Without overlooking its repressive character, he treats the USSR as a "normal" system that employed both socialist and nationalist ideologies for the purposes of technological and military modernization, preservation of empire, and expansion of its geopolitical power. Foregoing the projection of Western norms and assumptions, he seeks to achieve a clearer understanding of a civilization that has perplexed its critics and its champions alike.
