Product Description
Chapters: Marina Tsvetaeva, Alexander Pushkin, Anna Akhmatova, Ivan Krylov, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Vladimir Vysotsky, Mikhail Lermontov, Korney Chukovsky, Mariya Petrovykh, Konstantin Kinchev, Yevgeniy Dolmatovsky, Ilya Gabay. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 86. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin (Russian: , pronounced ) (June 6 1799February 10 1837) was a Russian author of the Romantic era who is considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. Pushkin pioneered the use of vernacular speech in his poems and plays, creating a style of storytellingmixing drama, romance, and satireassociated with Russian literature ever since and greatly influencing later Russian writers. He also wrote historical fiction. His Marie: A Story of Russian Love provides insight into Russia during the reign of Catherine the Great. Born in Moscow, Russia, Pushkin published his first poem at the age of fifteen, and was widely recognized by the literary establishment by the time of his graduation from the Imperial Lyceum in Tsarskoye Selo. Pushkin gradually became committed to social reform and emerged as a spokesman for literary radicals; in the early 1820s he clashed with the government, which sent him into exile in southern Russia. While under the strict surveillance of government censors and unable to travel or publish at will, he wrote his most famous play, the drama Boris Godunov, but could not publish it until years later. His novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, was published serially from 1825 to 1832. Pushkin and his wife Natalya Goncharova, whom he married in 1831, later became regulars of court society. In 1837, while falling into greater and greater debt amidst rumors that his wife had started conducting a scandalous affair, Push...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=52790 ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from Encyclopedia of Russian History, brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses.The length of the article is 522 words.The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase.You can view it with any web browser.Providing a comprehensive discussion of the people, politics, economics, religion, culture, and social systems of Russia, this work spans the time from the earliest beginnings of the Russian nation (among the ancient Eastern Slavic tribes) to the end of czarist Russia and on through the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. It provides the necessary information for readers to obtain a greater understanding of and appreciation for Russia in all of its many spheres. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Selections from Yevtushenko
Yevgeny Yevtushenko is one of my favorite Russian poets. Years ago, while I was in graduate school at the State University of New York at Buffalo, I bought this copy (the book lists its selling price as 75 cents!). I still enjoy repairing to this collection every so often.

There is a nice, albeit brief, introduction to his work, written by Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi. It does provide useful context for the poetry to follow. But it is the poetry that is the heart of this slim work. A few lines to illustrate his art. . . .

"Zima Junction"

"As we get older we get honester,
that's something."

"Lies"

"Telling lies to the young is wrong.
Proving to them that lies are true is wrong."

"Visit"

"with one sudden thought, how little I
Have done in life, how much I can do."

"Waking"

"And how I flattered myself
From time to time with proving to myself
Nothing in you could be unknown to me.
You don't belong to the mind's calculations,
And you disproved each of my demonstrations,
Since to be unexpected is your truth."

All in all, a nice, although brief, introduction to the poetry of Yevtushenko.

Powerful moral poetry
This collection of Yevtushenko includes the poem for which he is most famous, 'Babi Yar'. This powerful work of identification with Jewish suffering is a remarkable work of human feeling.
... Read more

Product Description
High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Rosy Armen, born on May 1, is a French singer of Armenian descent. Rosy Armen was born in Paris, France on May 1, the same day as the May Day worker's holiday. She has been singing since the age of 4, when she would lead the youth orchestra of her school until she eventually started singing solo songs. Despite her parents disapproval of a career in singing, she continued on with her passion and eventually, found herself singing next to established French music stars such as Gilbert Bécaud, Charles Aznavour, and Johnny Hallyday. This success made her a well-known figure not only in France, but also all over Europe, the Soviet Union, United States and the Middle East where there were many Armenian communities and through her participation in Persia's Persepolis festivities. ... Read more

Product Description
Tan cloth with full page pastedown of black and white photo of Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Translated by Tina Tupikina-Glaessner, Geoffrey Dutton, Igor Mezhakoff-Koriakin. With an Introduction by Rosh Ireland. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Quality of the Poetry Doesn't Match the Fame
Yevtushenko is one of the most well-known of modern Russian poets in the West. He became famous as a supposedly "dissident" poet by speaking out against the Stalin regime. But Bratsk Station suggests the quality of his poetry doesn't match his fame.

The structure of the poem presents us with an absurdity: the casting of an Egyptian pyramid, one of the ancient 7 wonders of the world, and one of the most enduring and fascinating symbols ever created, as the "bad guy" and a hydroelectric power station as the "good guy"! Bratsk Station is composed of a number of short individual poems. The distinguishing trait of all of them is the absence of any depth of thought or emotion that is the hallmark of great poetry. It is all on the surface, as if Yevtushenko is either incapable of diving deep or he fears he will lose his audience if he does. The point of it all is to promote Soviet socialism. Lenin, demonstrably one of the 20th century's most evil men, is glorified as some kind of demigod. Here are a couple examples of what this poem attempts to achieve:

From the poem "Party Card"

If the bullet is to reach the heart
It must go through the Party card.

The Party card is a second heart,
Indeed, the heart is a second Party card.

From the poem "Nushka"

I am Nushka Burtova, I mix concrete.
I produce twice my daily quota.

From the poem "In a Moment of Weakness"

I believe,
as in redemption,
that all suffering mankind
will unite
in Lenin.

With the lines quoted above in mind, I often felt as if I were reading comedy rather than an attempt at serious epic poetry. This sledgehammer communist propaganda was written by a man viewed as some sort of dissident, but the only dissent in Bratsk Station is the kind that the Soviet authorities wanted to read, and Yevtushenko delivered.

We might try to give Yevtushenko the benefit of the doubt by suggesting that perhaps something is lost in the translation and that the original Russian is on a much higher level, but it just can't be. His themes are so superficial and so deliberately ingratiating to his communist government, that these lines must be viewed as those of either a hopeless mediocrity or a poetic slave avoiding the threatened whips of his masters. Yevtushenko built his poem around the idea that slaves were forced to create the pyramid while the Russians who built the Bratsk Station are masters of their fate, although to any disinterested party reading the poem nowadays, the Russian people were the slaves and their Soviet masters were the equivalent of the ancient Egyptian overseers with their whips. It is not easy to find a difference between the slaves of ancient Egypt and those of the Soviet Union.

Even Rosh Ireland, in the Introduction, gently apologizes for the impression these poems leave in the reader that Yevtushenko is "servant to the publicist," by suggesting his other writings are more complex, although that is debatable.

Bratsk Station is bad poetry created by an unfortunate poet determined to satisfy the expectations of a totalitarian Soviet regime. But Yevtushenko's enthusiasm for "the revolution" seems a bit more intense than necessary to "encourage the applause."

Beautiful!
Yevgeny Yevtushenko is that rare poet whose passionate personal concerns are sufficiently representative of the concerns of his time and nation to make him spokesman for a generation. This volume is the complete Bratsk Station, Yevtushenko's major work, an epic cycle of thirty-five poems about the building of the hydroelectric power station at Bratsk in Siberia.To the poet, the Bratsk project represents the best elements of traditional and modern Russian life as brought together under the Soviet System.In Bratsk Station and the twenty-six other new poems collected here, Yevtushenko writes fervently of his faith in the ideals behind the Revolution, of the Russian land and people--and often of the troubled relation of the artist's "I" to the "we" of government. ... Read more

Product Description
ONLY 1000 COPIES PRINTED. Predstavljaem vashemu vnimaniju dolgozhdannuju knigu "Ves' Yevtushenko". Sam poet nazval etot grandioznyj po masshtabam proekt "stihotvornoj letopis'ju neprekrashhajushhejsja bor'by za kazhdy millimetr territorii svobody i spravedlivosti v nashej strane, i v drugih stranah, gde vse granicy prohodjat ne mezhdu gosudarstvami, a mezhdu ljud'mi". Stihi Yevtushenko perevedeny na 72 yazyka, ego znajut i ljubjat chitateli vsego mira, i jeto potomu, chto vsju svoju zhizn' on pishet o samom glavnom dlja kazhdogo cheloveka, na kakom by jazyke tot ni govoril, - o ljubvi, o chesti, o tom, kak vazhno v ljubyh situacijah sohranjat' svoe dostoinstvo i vsegda pomnit' ob istinnyh cennostjah. "Pered vami prikljuchencheskij roman v stihah o moej zhizni, legko perenosjashhijsja so stancii Zima na Aljasku, ili v Latinskuju Ameriku, v Japoniju, v Avstraliju, Gruziju, a to i v Dolgoprudnju... Moja ispoved', moi druzhby, moi nadezhdy, momenty pochti polnoj beznadezhnosti, predatel'stva teh, kogo v jetom nel'zja bylo zapodozrit', i pomoshh' teh, ot kogo ja ee sovsem ne zhdal... Eto kniga o krushenii SSSR, ruhnuvshem, kak Vavilonskaja bashnja obmanutyh nadezhd, i rekviem po krasnomu flagu, podnjatomu nad rejhstagom. No jeto i kniga very v budushhee Rossii, kogda kazhdyj mozhet prosheptat' pro sebja: "Esli budet Rossija, jeto budu i ja". Eto kniga blagodarnostej - vsem pojetam, vyrastivshim menja, i vsem drugim ljudjam, stavshim soavtorami ne tol'ko moih stihov, no i vsej moej zhizni, a sredi jetih soavtorov i vy, moi vernye chitateli, bez kotoryh ja sebja ne myslju", - pishet Yevtushenko vo vstuplenii k knige. V tom "Ves' Yevtushenko" voshli samye znachitel'nye proizvedenija pojeta, napisannye s 1937 goda (pervye pojeticheskie opyty) po 2007 god, a krome togo, stihi, posvjashhennye avtoram antologii "V nachale bylo Slovo... Desjat' vekov russkoj pojezii", unikal'nogo sobranija proizvedenij russkih pojetov, nad kotorym Yevtushenko rabotal poslednie dvenadcat' let. ... Read more