Death and Diplomacy in Persia
Author: I︠U︡riĭ Nikolaevich Tyni︠a︡nov
Publisher: Hyperion Books
Published: 1975
Total Pages: 376
ISBN-13:
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Diplomacy and Murder in Tehran
Author: Laurence Kelly
Publisher: Harvard Common Press
Published: 2006-10-17
Total Pages: 372
ISBN-13: 9781845111960
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this first biography of Alexander Griboyedov in English, Laurence Kelly paints a vivid picture of a man of remarkable literary talent and diplomatic gifts that were nevertheless overshadowed by ill-fortune. Involved in the 1825 Decembrist plot to overthrow the Tsarist state and the mission to further Russia's expansionist agenda in the Caucasus, the famous writer was eventually murdered by zealous mobs in Tehran. This book makes an invaluable contribution to the diplomatic history of Russia, the Caucasus and Iran at the same time illuminating the life and works of a writer who was among ninteenth-century Russia's most respected and prominent writers.
Diplomacy and Murder in Tehran
Author: Laurence Kelly
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2006-08-25
Total Pages: 336
ISBN-13: 0857712101
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this first biography of Griboyedov in English, Laurence Kelly paints a vivid picture of his remarkable literary and diplomatic gifts which were nevertheless overshadowed by ill-fortune and tragedy. When the Tehran mob broke into the Russian embassy and murdered all the diplomats there, the death toll included one of the most brilliant and promising stars in the early 19th century Russian literary firmament. Alexander Griboyedov's masterpiece Woe from Wit had been praised by Pushkin as making 'an indelible impression'. It also had the distinction of being immediately banned by the Russian censors. The play's alternative title was The Misfortune of Being Clever and perhaps Griboyedov's tragedy was that he was not clever enough to withstand the malign forces which shadowed and dogged his career. As a writer he narrowly escaped the ferocity of the Tsar's government on suspicion of complicity in the 1825 Decembrist plot by liberal aristocrats to overthrow the Tsarist state. After his brush with the wrath of the Tsar, Griboyedov was dispatched to Georgia and Iran, charged with furthering Russia's expansionist agenda in the Caucasus and beyond. As one of the earliest Russian players in the Great Game, he was a leading actor in defining the Tsar's relations with the Persians and the British in the region. But Griboyedov viewed his mission to Tehran as Russian Minister Plenipotentiary with the greatest foreboding. In the end his diplomatic skills were no match for the zealous mobs unleashed by the mullahs incensed by trivial incidents which they portrayed as a slur on Iran's self-esteem and the honour of Islam. This book makes an invaluable contribution to the diplomatic history of Russia, the Caucasus and Iran, while at the same time shedding much new light on the life and works of a writer who was among 19th century Russia's most respected and prominent literary figures.
The Strangling of Persia
Author: William Morgan Shuster
Publisher:
Published: 1912
Total Pages: 504
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWilliam Morgan Shuster (1877-1960) was an American lawyer and financial expert who served as treasurer general to the government of the Persian Empire in 1911. In 1910, the Persian government asked U.S. president William Howard Taft for technical assistance in reorganizing its financial system. Taft chose Shuster to head a mission of American experts to Tehran. The Strangling of Persia is Shuster's account of his experiences, published soon after his return to the United States. In the Anglo-Russian convention of August 31, 1907, Britain and Russia had divided Persia (present-day Iran) into a Russian sphere of influence in the north of the empire and a British sphere in the south (with additional arrangements for Afghanistan and Tibet). Each power was to have exclusive commercial rights in its sphere. Under this agreement and other arrangements, Persian customs revenues were collected to guarantee the payment of interest and principal on foreign loans. Seeking to defend the interests of the Persians, Shuster clashed repeatedly with Russian and British officials, until his mission was forced to withdraw in early 1912. The book provides a detailed account of the background to the mission, of political and financial conditions in Persia in the early 20th century, and of the rivalry among Russia, Britain, and eventually Germany for influence in the country. The narrative covers the Russian military intervention of 1911, the atrocities committed by Russian troops, and the coup and dissolution of the Majlis (parliament) carried out under Russian pressure in December 1911. The book includes numerous photographs and a map, an index, and an appendix with copies of key documents and correspondence
Russia's Turn to Persia
Author: Denis V. Volkov
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2018-08-16
Total Pages: 285
ISBN-13: 1108490786
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDraws on recently declassified and unpublished sources to provide an original and in-depth analysis of Russian and Soviet Iranian studies.
The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar
Author: Yury Tynyanov
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2021-04-27
Total Pages: 798
ISBN-13: 0231550545
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Death of Vazir-Mukhtar, a novel by Yury Tynyanov, one of the leading figures of the Russian formalist school, describes the final year in the life of Alexander Griboedov, the author of the comedy Woe from Wit. As ambassador to Persia, Griboedov was murdered in 1829 by a Tehrani mob during the sacking of the Russian embassy. One of the central texts of Russian formalist literary production, the novel is a brilliant meditation on the nature of historical and poetic consciousness and of artistic creation. It is a complex and fascinating work that explores the relationships among individual memory, historical fact, and the literary imagination. The result is a hybrid text, containing elements of various genres—historical, biographical, existential, and adventure novels—and a deeply personal, almost confessional testament to the writer’s relationship to his generation and the state. Completed in 1927, almost a century after the events it depicts, The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar marks the watershed between revolution and reaction. At a time when the Soviet regime was becoming increasingly restrictive of freedom of expression and conscience, Tynyanov grappled with the themes of disillusionment, betrayal, and unrealized potential. Unabashedly intellectual yet filled with intrigue and suspense, The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar is a great historical novel of Russian modernism.
On Distant Service
Author: Susan M. Stein
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Published: 2020-07-01
Total Pages: 434
ISBN-13: 1640123520
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOn July 18, 1924, a mob in Tehran killed U.S. foreign service officer Robert Whitney Imbrie. His violent death, the first political murder in the history of the service, outraged the American people. Though Imbrie's loss briefly made him a cause célèbre, subsequent events quickly obscured his extraordinary life and career. Susan M. Stein tells the story of a figure steeped in adventure and history. Imbrie rejected a legal career to volunteer as an ambulance driver during World War I and joined the State Department when the United States entered the war. Assigned to Russia, he witnessed the October Revolution, fled ahead of a Bolshevik arrest order, and continued to track communist activity in Turkey even as the country's war of independence unfolded around him. His fateful assignment to Persia led to his death at age forty-one and set off political repercussions that cloud relations between the United States and Iran to this day. Drawing on a wealth of untapped materials, On Distant Service returns readers to an era when dash and diplomacy went hand-in-hand.
Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity
Author: Nicola Di Cosmo
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2018-04-26
Total Pages: 1284
ISBN-13: 1108547001
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEmpires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity offers an integrated picture of Rome, China, Iran, and the Steppes during a formative period of world history. In the half millennium between 250 and 750 CE, settled empires underwent deep structural changes, while various nomadic peoples of the steppes (Huns, Avars, Turks, and others) experienced significant interactions and movements that changed their societies, cultures, and economies. This was a transformational era, a time when Roman, Persian, and Chinese monarchs were mutually aware of court practices, and when Christians and Buddhists criss-crossed the Eurasian lands together with merchants and armies. It was a time of greater circulation of ideas as well as material goods. This volume provides a conceptual frame for locating these developments in the same space and time. Without arguing for uniformity, it illuminates the interconnections and networks that tied countless local cultural expressions to far-reaching inter-regional ones.
An American Martyr in Persia: The Epic Life and Tragic Death of Howard Baskerville
Author: Reza Aslan
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2022-10-11
Total Pages: 219
ISBN-13: 1324004487
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this erudite and piercing biography, best-selling author Reza Aslan proves that one person’s actions can have revolutionary consequences that reverberate the world over. Little known in America but venerated as a martyr in Iran, Howard Baskerville was a twenty-two-year-old Christian missionary from South Dakota who traveled to Persia (modern-day Iran) in 1907 for a two-year stint teaching English and preaching the gospel. He arrived in the midst of a democratic revolution—the first of its kind in the Middle East—led by a group of brilliant young firebrands committed to transforming their country into a fully self-determining, constitutional monarchy, one with free elections and an independent parliament. The Persian students Baskerville educated in English in turn educated him about their struggle for democracy, ultimately inspiring him to leave his teaching post and join them in their fight against a tyrannical shah and his British and Russian backers. “The only difference between me and these people is the place of my birth," Baskerville declared, “and that is not a big difference.” In 1909, Baskerville was killed in battle alongside his students, but his martyrdom spurred on the revolutionaries who succeeded in removing the shah from power, signing a new constitution, and rebuilding parliament in Tehran. To this day, Baskerville’s tomb in the city of Tabriz remains a place of pilgrimage. Every year, thousands of Iranians visit his grave to honor the American who gave his life for Iran. In this rip-roaring tale of his life and death, Aslan gives us a powerful parable about the universal ideals of democracy—and to what degree Americans are willing to support those ideals in a foreign land. Woven throughout is an essential history of the nation we now know as Iran—frequently demonized and misunderstood in the West. Indeed, Baskerville’s life and death represent a “road not taken” in Iran. Baskerville’s story, like his life, is at the center of a whirlwind in which Americans must ask themselves: How seriously do we take our ideals of constitutional democracy and whose freedom do we support?
The Life and Death of Ancient Cities
Author: Greg Woolf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-04-08
Total Pages: 512
ISBN-13: 0190618566
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe dramatic story of the rise and collapse of Europe's first great urban experiment The growth of cities around the world in the last two centuries is the greatest episode in our urban history, but it is not the first. Three thousand years ago most of the Mediterranean basin was a world of villages; a world without money or writing, without temples for the gods or palaces for the mighty. Over the centuries that followed, however, cities appeared in many places around the Inland Sea, built by Greeks and Romans, and also by Etruscans and Phoenicians, Tartessians and Lycians, and many others. Most were tiny by modern standards, but they were the building blocks of all the states and empires of antiquity. The greatest--Athens and Corinth, Syracuse and Marseilles, Alexandria and Ephesus, Persepolis and Carthage, Rome and Byzantium--became the powerhouses of successive ancient societies, not just political centers but also the places where ancient art and literatures were created and accumulated. And then, half way through the first millennium, most withered away, leaving behind ruins that have fascinated so many who came after. Based on the most recent historical and archaeological evidence, The Life and Death of Ancient Cities provides a sweeping narrative of one of the world's first great urban experiments, from Bronze Age origins to the demise of cities in late antiquity. Greg Woolf chronicles the history of the ancient Mediterranean city, against the background of wider patterns of human evolution, and of the unforgiving environment in which they were built. Richly illustrated, the book vividly brings to life the abandoned remains of our ancient urban ancestors and serves as a stark reminder of the fragility of even the mightiest of cities.
