Most Popular Books by Vladimir

Reading versions of important lectures given in the 1950s demonstrate Nabokov's critical talents and reveal his judgments on the works and achievement of Austen, Dickens, Flaubert, Joyce, Kafka, Proust, and Stevenson

Fra et russisk emigrantmiljø i 1920'ernes Berlin med en ung russisk forfatters oplevelser og litterære arbejder som midtpunkt

The acclaimed author presents his unique insights into the works of great Russian authors including Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Gogol, Gorki, and Chekhov. In the 1940s, when Vladimir Nabokov first embarked on his academic career in the United States, he brought with him hundreds of original lectures on the authors he most admired. For two decades those lectures served as the basis for Nabokov’s teaching, first at Wellesley and then at Cornell, as he introduced undergraduates to the delights of great fiction. This volume collects Nabokov’s famous lectures on 19th century Russian literature, with analysis and commentary on Nikolay Gogol’s Dead Souls and “The Overcoat”; Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons; Maxim Gorki’s “On the Rafts”; Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilych; two short stories and a play by Anton Chekhov; and several works by Fyodor Dostoevski, including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Possessed. This volume also includes Nabokov’s lectures on the art of translation, the nature of Russian censorship, and other topics. Featured throughout the volume are photographic reproductions of Nabokov’s original notes. “This volume . . . never once fails to instruct and stimulate. This is a great Russian talking of great Russians.” —Anthony Burgess Introduction by Fredson Bowers

An astonishingly frank self-portrait by Russia's president

A darkly comic novel of suspense, literary idolatry and one-upmanship, and political intrigue from one of the leading writers of the twentieth century, the acclaimed author of Lolita. "Half-poem, half-prose...a creation of perfect beauty, symmetry, strangeness, originality and moral truth. One of the great works of art of this century." —Mary McCarthy, New York Times bestselling author of The Group An ingeniously constructed parody of detective fiction and learned commentary, Pale Fire offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures, at the center of which is a 999-line poem written by the literary genius John Shade just before his death. Surrounding the poem is a foreword and commentary by the demented scholar Charles Kinbote, who interweaves adoring literary analysis with the fantastical tale of an assassin from the land of Zembla in pursuit of a deposed king. Brilliantly constructed and wildly inventive, Vladimir Nabokov's witty novel achieves that rarest of things in literature—perfect tragicomic balance.

Published two weeks after his seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of Nabokov's greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist. It tells a love story troubled by incest. It is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue. Ada, or Ardor is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat. This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom.

"This personification of wisdom with golden hair and a radiant aura echoes both the eternal feminine and the world soul. Rooted in Christian and Jewish mysticism, Eastern Orthodox iconography, Greek philosophy, and European romanticism, the Sophiology that suffuses Solovyov's philosophical and artistic works is both intellectually sophisticated and profoundly inspiring. Judith Deutsch Kornblatt brings together key texts from Solovyov's writings about Sophia: poetry, fiction, drama, and philosophy, all extensively annotated and some available in English for the first time (with assistance from the translators Boris Jakim and Laury Magnus)."--Amazon website.

Awe and exhiliration--along with heartbreak and mordant wit--abound in Lolita, Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America. Most of all, it is a meditation on love--love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.

Looks at the rise of Vladimir Putin, his presidency, and the influence of the FSB on Russian life, economics, and government.

From the writer who shocked and delighted the world with his novels Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, or Ardor, and so many others, comes a magnificent collection of stories. Written between the 1920s and 1950s, these sixty-five tales--eleven of which have been translated into English for the first time--display all the shades of Nabokov's imagination. They range from sprightly fables to bittersweet tales of loss, from claustrophobic exercises in horror to a connoisseur's samplings of the table of human folly. Read as a whole, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov offers and intoxicating draft of the master's genius, his devious wit, and his ability to turn language into an instrument of ecstasy.

2009 Reprint.State and Revolution, perhaps Lenin most influential work, describes the role that the state plays in society along with the necessity of proletarian revolution. Written for a Marxist audience, Lenin spends much of the pamphlet criticizing the actions of the social democrats who dominated the communist movement at that time as well as elaborating on the role of the dictatorship of the proletariat following revolution. The pamphlet is commonly regarded as one of Lenin's most important works and much of it forms the basis for today's Marxist thought.

The wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime--his own murder. • “A beautiful mystery plot, not to be revealed.” – Newsweek “Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically.” – John Updike “One of Mr. Nabokov’s finest, most challenging and provocative novels.” – The New York Times Despair’s protagonist, Hermann, is another masterly portrait in the fascinating gallery of living characters Vladmir Nabokov has given to world literature. In his pseudo wordliness, his odd genius, Hermann is one with such other heteroclitic neurotic Nabokovian creations as Humbert Humbert and Charles Kimbote. Rapt in his own reality, incapable of escaping or explicating it, he is as solitary in his abyss as Luzhin or Charlotte Haze of Lolita. Despair is illuminated throughout by the virtuosity and cunning wit that are Vladimir Nabokov’s hallmarks.

Russia's rich history is full of secrets: there's not another country in the world with so many skeletons in its closet. Vladimir Medinskiy's new book offers the reader the opportunity to get better acquainted with some myths about Russia in an quick, easy and entertaining way. The book covers some of the most interesting, colourful and controversial debates in Russian history and the most popular myths about Russia: vodka and its role in some incredible adventures, Russia's problems (apart from the roads and having too many fools), some lessons from the Bastille and the Civil War, the last testament of Peter the Great, amongst many others. In his book the author tackles some of the most pressing questions about Russia: whether you can trust Russians, the meaning of progress in Russian terms, who really won at the Battle of Borodino two hundred years ago, why Russians call Napoleon 'the consummate liar', and also whether Russians are the true originators of petrol, mobile phones and the cinema. Myths About Russia is Medinskiy's original and humorous take on the subject: in this book, he diligently unravels the myths surrounding this vast and complex nation, picking them apart to uncover the truth about Russia and her fascinating history.

The author points to the spark of divinity that we see in another human being and shows how this "living ideal of Divine love, antecedent to our lvoe, contains in itself the secret of the idealization of our love." He argues that love between men and women has a key role in the mystical transfiguration of the world. --Publisher.

The classic novel from the author of Lolita, brilliantly portraying one man's ruin through love and betrayal.

In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude," an imaginary crime that defies definition. Cincinnatus spends his last days in an absurd jail, where he is visited by chimerical jailers, an executioner who masquerades as a fellow prisoner, and by his in-laws, who lug their furniture with them into his cell. When Cincinnatus is led out to be executed, he simply wills his executioners out of existence: they disappear, along with the whole world they inhabit.

In Russian Society and Politics 1921-1929, Vladimir Brovkin offers a comprehensive cultural, political, economic and social history of developments in Russia in the 1920's.

"'Rasplata' in no way contains 'reminiscences, ' but is simply the diary of an eye-witness, presented in the form of a narrative ... I [Commander Semenoff] kept a diary from January 30, 1904 to December 19, 1906 (even a little longer), and made daily entries, on specially important days even hourly. Everything I tell of here is based on the data of my diary"--Author's preface.

Smurov, is a lovelorn, excruciatingly self-conscious Russian émigré living in prewar Berlin, who commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband, only to suffer even greater indignities in the afterlife.

'In general Glory is my happiest thing.' 'The fun of Glory is . . . to be sought in the echoing and linking of minor events, in back-and-forth switches, which produce an illusion of impetus; in an old daydream directly becoming the blessing of the ball hugged to one's chest, or in the casual vision of Martin's mother grieving beyond the time-frame of the novel in an abstraction of the future that the reader can only guess at, even after he has raced through the last seven chapters where a regular madness of structural twists and a masquerade of all characters culminate in a furious finale, although nothing much happens at the very end - just a bird perching on a wicket in the greyness of a wet day' - Vladimir Nabokov

This book is about the early era of the Russian space challenge. It is based on the notes of Vladimir Suvorov, a distinguished chief documentary cinematographer, who eyewitnessed and described in his top secret diary all these events from 1959 to 1969. He and his team made 35 films on the Russian conquest of space. He worked closely with the key scientists including Chief Designer Sergey Korolev, the President of the Academy of Sciences Mstislav Keldish and other high ranking military officers who were in charge of the Soviet space program. Many cosmonauts, especially the first ones like Yuri Gagarin, German Titov, et al., became his friends. This book is the first close up and personal account of these remarkable events.

"The nature of the icon cannot be grasped by means of pure art criticism, nor by the adoption of a sentimental point of view. Its forms are based on the wisdom contained in the theological and liturgical writings of the Eastern Orthodox Church and are imtimately bound up with the experience of the contemplative life. The present work is the first of its kind to give a reliable introduction to the spiritual background of this art. The introduction into the meaning and language of the icons by Ouspensky imparts to us in an admirable way the spiritual conceptions of the Eastern Orthodox Church which are often so foreign to us, but without the knowledge of which we cannot possibly understand the world of the icon." -- Back cover.

Solovyov's first lecture on humatity's epic journey was read on January 26, 1878 to a packed St. Petersburg audience that included Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. The lectures continued until 1881, and mark a milestone in the intellectual and spiritual history of Russia and the world. -- Book cover.

During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred, and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their deaths, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names, to a certain extent, for the 'consolation' of the oppressed classes, and with the object of duping the latter, while, at the same time, robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge, and vulgarizing it. Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labour movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism. They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is, or seems, acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now 'Marxists' (don't laugh!). And more and more frequently, German bourgeois scholars, only yesterday specialists in the annihilation of Marxism, are speaking of the 'national-German' Marx, who, they claim, educated the labour unions, which are so splendidly organised for the purpose of waging a predatory war!

The Ringing Cedars Series is creating a wave of excitement that is sweeping the globe with positive, life-transforming messages of pure love energy from the beautiful Anastasia.

Over 10 million copies sold in 20 languages

The Devil in History is a provocative analysis of the relationship between communism and fascism. Reflecting the author’s personal experiences within communist totalitarianism, this is a book about political passions, radicalism, utopian ideals, and their catastrophic consequences in the twentieth century’s experiments in social engineering. Vladimir Tismaneanu brilliantly compares communism and fascism as competing, sometimes overlapping, and occasionally strikingly similar systems of political totalitarianism. He examines the inherent ideological appeal of these radical, revolutionary political movements, the visions of salvation and revolution they pursued, the value and types of charisma of leaders within these political movements, the place of violence within these systems, and their legacies in contemporary politics. The author discusses thinkers who have shaped contemporary understanding of totalitarian movements—people such as Hannah Arendt, Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Camus, François Furet, Tony Judt, Ian Kershaw, Leszek Kolakowski, Richard Pipes, and Robert C. Tucker. As much a theoretical analysis of the practical philosophies of Marxism-Leninism and Fascism as it is a political biography of particular figures, this book deals with the incarnation of diabolically nihilistic principles of human subjugation and conditioning in the name of presumably pure and purifying goals. Ultimately, the author claims that no ideological commitment, no matter how absorbing, should ever prevail over the sanctity of human life. He comes to the conclusion that no party, movement, or leader holds the right to dictate to the followers to renounce their critical faculties and to embrace a pseudo-miraculous, a mystically self-centered, delusional vision of mandatory happiness.