Fall of Giants

Fall of Giants is his magnificent new historical epic. The first novel in The Century Trilogy, it follows the fates of five interrelated families-American, German, Russian, English, and Welsh-as they move through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for women's suffrage.

 

The art of piano playing: A scientific approach

So many of the great pianists and teachers have come out of Poland and Russia (Rubinstein, Anton as well as Arthur, Leschetizky, Paderewski, the Lhevinnes, Gilels, Richter, and others), yet we know little about their methods of learning and teaching. George Kochevitsky in THE ART OF PIANO PLAYING supplies some important sources of information previously previously unavailable in this country. Russian sources alone occupy four columns of his bibliography on 'History and Theory of Pianism.'

Music of a Life

Makine (Dreams of My Russian Summers) is a Russian emigre who writes in the language of his adopted France, but retains a poetic intensity of vision that seems peculiarly Russian. His latest is an extraordinarily compressed brief novel, but it is a novel not a novella in scope nonetheless. It begins as the narrator, waiting for a train to Moscow somewhere in the wilds of Siberia, meets a mysterious musician, Alexe Berg, and is told his somber life story. Berg, a son of the intelligentsia growing up in the Stalin-shadowed '30s, is about to make his debut as a concert pianist, in 1940, when his parents are arrested, and he barely escapes, taking refuge with relatives in the Ukraine.

The Companion to Modern Russian Culture

This volume offers an introduction to Russian culture in all its rich diversity, including the historical conditions that helped shape it and the arts that express its highest achievements. Newly commissioned essays by leading scholars explore language, religion, geography, ideological structures, folk ethos and popular culture, literature, music, theater, art, and film. A chronology and guides to further reading are also provided. Overall, the volume reveals, for students, scholars and all those interested in Russia, the dilemmas, strengths, and complexities of the Russian cultural experience.

Pride and Panic: Russian Imagination of the West in Post-Soviet Film

Since the fall of Communism, Russians have struggled to reconcile their social traditions with a flood of Western cultural imports. Contemporary Russian cinema has latched on to the resulting confusion and ambivalence, mining societal upheaval for revolutionary cinematic topics. Yana Hashamova explores this largely uncharted territory in Pride and Panic.

A groundbreaking study, Pride and Panic probes cinematic representations of the unsettled Russian national consciousness, a complex cocktail of fear, anger, and anxious uncertainty.