"The Complete Travel Guide Series" offers a comprehensive exploration of diverse destinations worldwide. Each book provides detailed insights into local culture, history, attractions, and practical travel tips, ensuring travellers are well-prepared to embark on memorable journeys. With vibrant illustrations, beautiful pictures and up to date information, this series is an essential companion for any type of traveller seeking enriching experiences.
Privyet! Explore the Russian language with this fantastic beginner's guide With over 260 million speakers around the world, Russian remains one of the most popular and marketable languages you can learn. And for those who have no idea where to begin, Russian For Dummies is the perfect first step! In this easy-to-understand resource for Russian language beginners, you'll discover basic grammar and common expressions you might use while shopping, dining out, traveling, or conducting business. You'll also find simplified and generalized conjugation rules and a streamlined approach to grammar based on how you actually understand the language, rather than technical rules and details. This book offers: Supplemental online resources so you can hear how native Russian speakers use the words you're trying to learn Guidance on identifying Cyrillic letters from the alphabet used by Russian speakers and writers Tons of useful exercise and practice opportunities you can take advantage of to sharpen your skills Perfect for any newcomer to the Russian language trying to pick up their first few phrases, Russian For Dummies is a fantastic first foray into conversational Russian that will have you ordering meals, going shopping, and navigating other day-to-day situations with ease. Удачи! (That means good luck!)
Objects of Liberty explores the prevalence of souvenirs in British women’s writing during the French Revolution and Napoleonic era. It argues that women writers employed the material and memorial object of the souvenir to circulate revolutionary ideas and engage in the masculine realm of political debate. While souvenir collecting was a standard practice of privileged men on the eighteenth-century Grand Tour, women began to partake in this endeavor as political events in France heightened interest in travel to the Continent. Looking at travel accounts by Helen Maria Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft, Catherine and Martha Wilmot, Charlotte Eaton, and Mary Shelley, this study reveals how they used souvenirs to affect political thought in Britain and contribute to conversations about individual and national identity. At a time when gendered beliefs precluded women from full citizenship, they used souvenirs to redefine themselves as legitimate political actors. Objects of Liberty is a story about the ways that women established political power and agency through material culture.
History and travel mix in this detailed description of a trip to Moscow and St Petersburg. Get ready to learn the true modern Russia, and relive its glorious and mysterious past
“A remarkable novel” of a post-Communist Russia filled with gangsters and oligarchs, and one man’s shady business deal that could land him in a world of trouble (The Boston Globe). Part speculative fiction, part satire, Let’s Put the Future Behind Us is a romp through 1990s Russia, as the closed society of the Soviet Union morphs into a modern capitalist free-for-all and Max Borodin finds himself, his wife, and his mistress in mortal danger—in “a world of petty bureaucrats, shameless opportunists, and full-blown mafiosi” (Entertainment Weekly). “An absurdist thriller narrated by one Max Borodin, an ex-Communist Party hack who has re-invented himself as a commercial operator with a cynical understanding of how to manipulate the strings of power. Cops are paid off with dollar bills, bureaucrats with phoney documents and racketeers with the consumer opiates of their choice. Max is always up for the main chance, and before long finds himself logged into a drug deal involving psychotic Georgian gangsters, corrupt local entrepreneurs, the investors in a leaky crematorium and a messianic fascist demagogue who wants to build a plastic dome over Russia to secure it against ‘Western sneak attacks.’ At the same time, he has to balance the demands of his irascible wife and voracious mistress while rescuing his gullible brother from the folly of building a ‘Sovietland’ theme park.” —Wired “The grimmest, funniest, and one of the most cannily on-target accounts yet about the helter-skelter fast lane of life in the New Russia.” —The Boston Globe
Russia's interactions with the West have been a perennial theme of Slavic Studies, and of Russian culture and politics. Likewise, representations of Russia have shaped the identities of many western cultures. No longer providing the 'Evil Empire' of 20th American popular consciousness, images of Russia have more recently bifurcated along two streams: that of the impoverished refugee and that of the sinister mafia gang. Focusing on film as an engine of intercultural communication, this is the first book to explore mutual perceptions of the foreign Other in the cinema of Russia and the West during, and after, communism. The book's structure reflects both sides of this fascinating dialogue: Part 1 covers Russian/Soviet cinematic representations of otherness, and Part 2 treats western representations of Russia and the Soviet Union. An extensive Introduction sets the dialogue in a theoretical context. The contributors include leading film scholars from the USA, Europe and Russia.
Among the many examples of Russian-American émigré literature, a number of less known authors moved to the USA, following their predecessors' transnational and plurilingual experiences. The bilingual (and sometimes trilingual) expressions in their works written in English invite a contrastive analysis of their transition from their source language, Russian, to their target language, English. This book explores the linguistic structure of the autobiographies of four Russian-American writers (Cournos, Nabokov, Berberova and Shteyngart) bringing into focus the linguistic "geology" of their texts, as they record their passage from a Russian world to an English one. These linguistic passages are examined from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective, by dwelling on the geographies of the émigrés' itineraries as well as on the process of linguistic transformation that such itineraries generated. By analyzing these writers' geographic and linguistic routes, this volume engages the reader in a metalinguistic discourse and highlights the influence of these first plurilingual experiments on modern theories concerning linguistic globalization.
Focusing on the experiences of Russian migrants to the United Kingdom, this book explores the connection between migrations, homes and identities. It evaluates several approaches to studying them, and is structured around a series of case studies on attitudes to homemaking, food and cooking, and clothing.
Examines the lives of recent Russian-Jewish immigrants in Germany. Sweet Burdens presents a detailed ethnographic study of the lives of Russian-Jewish immigrants in Germany over the past twenty years. Focusing on the first generation of adult immigrants, Sveta Roberman examines how they question and negotiate their moral economy and civic culture vis-à-vis the host German state and society, on the one hand, and the Holocaust past, on the other. She approaches the immigrant-host encounter as one of many cycles of social exchanges taking place in multiple and diverse arenas. The book sheds light on a number of issues, including the moral economy of Jewish-German relations, immigrants performances of civics and citizenship, modes of inclusion and exclusion, consumption and consumerism, work and the phenomena of unemployment and underemployment, the concept of community, and the dynamics and difficulties of reinventing Jewish identity and tradition.
