The Commissariat of Enlightenment

The Commissariat of Enlightenment

Author: Ken Kalfus

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2004-02-03

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0060501391

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Russia, 1910. Leo Tolstoy lies dying in Astapovo, a remote railway station. Members of the press from around the world have descended upon this sleepy hamlet to record his passing for a public suddenly ravenous for celebrity news. They have been joined by a film company whose cinematographer, Nikolai Gribshin, is capturing the extraordinary scene and learning how to wield his camera as a political tool. At this historic moment he comes across two men -- the scientist, Professor Vorobev, and the revolutionist, Joseph Stalin -- who have radical, mysterious plans for the future. Soon they will accompany him on a long, cold march through an era of brutality and absurdity. The Commissariat of Enlightenment is a mesmerizing novel of ideas that brilliantly links the tragedy and comedy of the Russian Revolution with the global empire of images that occupies our imaginations today.


The Commissariat of Enlightenment

The Commissariat of Enlightenment

Author: Sheila Fitzpatrick

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2002-06-06

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 9780521524384

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A study of Lunacharsky's commissariat which ran both education and the arts in Bolshevik Russia.


The Commissariat of Enlightenment

The Commissariat of Enlightenment

Author: Ken Kalfus

Publisher: Zondervan

Published: 2009-02-19

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 0061855944

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Russia, 1910. Leo Tolstoy lies dying in Astapovo, a remote railway station. Members of the press from around the world have descended upon this sleepy hamlet to record his passing for a public suddenly ravenous for celebrity news. They have been joined by a film company whose cinematographer, Nikolai Gribshin, is capturing the extraordinary scene and learning how to wield his camera as a political tool. At this historic moment he comes across two men -- the scientist, Professor Vorobev, and the revolutionist, Joseph Stalin -- who have radical, mysterious plans for the future. Soon they will accompany him on a long, cold march through an era of brutality and absurdity. The Commissariat of Enlightenment is a mesmerizing novel of ideas that brilliantly links the tragedy and comedy of the Russian Revolution with the global empire of images that occupies our imaginations today.


Everyday Stalinism

Everyday Stalinism

Author: Sheila Fitzpatrick

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1999-03-04

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 0195050002

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Focusing on urban areas in the 1930s, this college professor illuminates the ways that Soviet city-dwellers coped with this world, examining such diverse activities as shopping, landing a job, and other acts.


The Cultural Front

The Cultural Front

Author: Sheila Fitzpatrick

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-08-06

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1501724088

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When Lenin asked, "Who will beat whom?" (Kto kogo?), he had no plan to wage revolutionary class war in culture. Many young Communists thought differently, however. Seeking in the name of the proletariat to wrest "cultural hegemony" from the intelligentsia, they turned culture into a battlefield in the 1920s. But was this, as Communist militants thought, a genuine class struggle between "proletarian" Communists and the "bourgeois" intelligentsia? Or was it, as the intelligentsia believed, an onslaught by the ruling Communist Party on the eternal principles of cultural autonomy and intellectual freedom? In this volume, one of the foremost historians of the Soviet Union chronicles the fierce battle on "the cultural front" from the October Revolution through the Stalinist 1930s. Sheila Fitzpatrick brings together ten of her essays—two previously unpublished and all revised for inclusion here—which illuminate key arenas of the prolonged struggle over cultural values and institutional control. Individual essays deal with such major issues as the Cultural Revolution, the formation of the new Stalinist elite, and socialist realism, as well as recounting colorful episodes including the uproar over Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, arguments over sexual mores, and the new consumerism of the 1930s. Closely examining the cultural elites and orthodoxies that developed under Stalin, Fitzpatrick offers a provocative reinterpretation of the struggle's final outcome in which the intelligentsia, despite its loss of autonomy and the debasement of its culture, emerged as a partial victor. The Cultural Front is essential reading for anyone interested in the formative history of the Soviet Union and the dynamic relationship between culture and politics.


Russia in the Era of NEP

Russia in the Era of NEP

Author: Sheila Fitzpatrick

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 1991-09-22

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9780253206572

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" . . . a comprehensive look at an enigmatic era . . . " —Choice "This provocative collection of essays certainly takes some of the polish off Soviet socialism's golden age." —Journal of Interdisciplinary History "The authors and editors of this splendid volume deserve great praise. Their work moves the field of Soviet history several large steps forward." —Slavic Review Lenin's New Economic Policy of the 1920s, although a relatively free and open potential alternative to Soviet communism, was also a time of extreme tension, as Russian society and culture were rocked by the forces of resistance and change. These essays examine the social and cultural dimensions of NEP in urban and rural Russia in the years before Stalin and rapid industrialization.


Women, the State and Revolution

Women, the State and Revolution

Author: Wendy Z. Goldman

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1993-11-26

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9780521458160

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Focusing on how women, peasants and orphans responded to Bolshevk attempts to remake the family, this text reveals how, by 1936, legislation designed to liberate women had given way to increasingly conservative solutions strengthening traditional family values.


A Disorder Peculiar to the Country

A Disorder Peculiar to the Country

Author: Ken Kalfus

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2009-02-24

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 0061856347

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A National Book Award Finalist "The best novel yet about 9/11.... A brilliant new comedy of manners, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country is about the way a conflict takes on a logic and momentum of its own." —Salon “Savagely hilarious.” —Elle Joyce and Marshall each think the other is killed on September 11—and must swallow their disappointment when the other arrives home. As their bitter divorce is further complicated by anthrax scares, suicide bombs, and foreign wars, they suffer, in ways unexpectedly personal and increasingly ludicrous, the many strange ravages of our time. In this astonishing black comedy, Kalfus suggests how our nation’s public calamities have encroached upon our most private illusions.


PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies

PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies

Author: Ken Kalfus

Publisher: Milkweed Editions

Published: 2011-02-01

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1571318224

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The acclaimed short story and novella collection by “a virtuoso of the dismal comedy of Soviet life”—and the basis for the HBO film PU-239 (The New York Times). Ken Kalfus traverses a century of Russian history in tales that range from hair-raising to comic to fabulous. The astonishing title story follows a doomed nuclear power plant worker as he attempts to hawk plutonium in Moscow’s black market. In “Budyonnovsk,” a young man hopes that the takeover of his town by Chechen rebels will somehow save his marriage. Set in the 1920s, “Birobidzhan” is the bittersweet story of a Jewish couple journeying to the Soviet Far East, where they intend to establish the modern world’s first Jewish state. The novella, “Peredelkino,” which closes the book, traces the fortunes of a 1960s literary apparatchik whose romantic intrigues inadvertently become political. In these and other stories, Kalfus captures the famously enigmatic Russian psyche. A PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist