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Russia

Books that are set in or about Russia and Russians.

New Releases Tagged "Russia"

Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War's Most Extraordinary Spy

Notes of Deception: How a Quartet of American Musicians Outwitted the KGB – The Untold Russian History of a Daring Cold War Mission

China und Russland: Kurze Geschichte einer langen Beziehung

The Shanghai Agents: The Soviet Plot to Start a Revolution in Interwar China

Most Read This Week Tagged "Russia"

More most read this week tagged "russia"...

Lists

Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar

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Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

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A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie by Ágota Kristóf

Women Writers from Central & Eastern Europe in English Translation

242 books — 181 voters

Related Genres

Fiction
Cultural
Ukraine
Russian History
Rus
Soviet Union
Russian Revolution
Romanovs

Moscow
Russian Empire
Russian Federation
Tsars
Ficțion
Muscovy
Ruś
Fiçtion

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“ Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience. I first became involved with the Czech opposition in 1968 when it was an intoxicating and celebrated cause. Then, during the depressing 1970s and 1980s I was a member of a routine committee that tried with limited suc Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience. I first became involved with the Czech opposition in 1968 when it was an intoxicating and celebrated cause. Then, during the depressing 1970s and 1980s I was a member of a routine committee that tried with limited success to help the reduced forces of Czech dissent to stay nourished (and published). The most pregnant moment of that commitment was one that I managed to miss at the time: I passed an afternoon with Zdenek Mlynar, exiled former secretary of the Czech Communist Party, who in the bleak early 1950s in Moscow had formed a friendship with a young Russian militant with an evident sense of irony named Mikhail Sergeyevitch Gorbachev. In 1988 I was arrested in Prague for attending a meeting of one of Vaclav Havel's 'Charter 77' committees. That outwardly exciting experience was interesting precisely because of its almost Zen-like tedium. I had gone to Prague determined to be the first visiting writer not to make use of the name Franz Kafka, but the numbing bureaucracy got the better of me. When I asked why I was being detained, I was told that I had no need to know the reason! Totalitarianism is itself a cliché (as well as a tundra of pulverizing boredom) and it forced the cliché upon me in turn. I did have to mention Kafka in my eventual story. The regime fell not very much later, as I had slightly foreseen in that same piece that it would. (I had happened to notice that the young Czechs arrested with us were not at all frightened by the police, as their older mentors had been and still were, and also that the police themselves were almost fatigued by their job. This was totalitarianism practically yawning itself to death.) A couple of years after that I was overcome to be invited to an official reception in Prague, to thank those who had been consistent friends through the stultifying years of what 'The Party' had so perfectly termed 'normalization.' As with my tiny moment with Nelson Mandela, a whole historic stretch of nothingness and depression, combined with the long and deep insult of having to be pushed around by boring and mediocre people, could be at least partially canceled and annealed by one flash of humor and charm and generosity. ...more ”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

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“ But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them. ”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

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