The Revolt

Literature & Fiction

Berberova, Nina

Schwartz, Marian

Contemporary

HarperCollins, Publishers

This is an extraordinary personal testament, the story of one boy's triumph in the face of impossible obstacles. Born with cerebral palsy in Moscow, Ruben Gallego was hidden away in Soviet state institutions by his maternal grandfather, the secretary general of the Spanish Communist Party in the 1960s. His was a boyhood spent in orphanages, hospitals, and old-age homes, a life of emotional deprivation and loss of human dignity. And yet, there is no self-pity here, no bitterness, only an unfailing regard for the truth. Gallego's story is one of neglect and mistreatment but also of shared small pleasures, of courage, of the power of the human will, and of a child's growing fascination with books and the worlds he finds in them. Winner of the 2003 Russian Booker Prize, White on Black is "one of those rare books one can call revolutionary" (Corriere della Sera, Italy).

White On Black

GALLEGO, RUBÉN

Parenting & Relationships

Houghton, mifflin, harcourt

The first complete and accurate English translation of Bulgakov’s classic novel, accompanied by a substantial historical introduction White Guard, Mikhail Bulgakov’s semi-autobiographical first novel, is the story of the Turbin family in Kiev in 1918. Alexei, Elena, and Nikolka Turbin have just lost their mother—their father had died years before—and find themselves plunged into the chaotic civil war that erupted in the Ukraine in the wake of the Russian Revolution. In the context of this family’s personal loss and the social turmoil surrounding them, Bulgakov creates a brilliant picture of the existential crises brought about by the revolution and the loss of social, moral, and political certainties. He confronts the reader with the bewildering cruelty that ripped Russian life apart at the beginning of the last century as well as with the extraordinary ways in which the Turbins preserved their humanity.
In this volume Marian Schwartz, a leading translator, offers the first complete and accurate translation of the definitive original text of Bulgakov’s novel. She includes the famous dream sequence, omitted in previous translations, and beautifully solves the stylistic issues raised by Bulgakov’s ornamental prose. Readers with an interest in Russian literature, culture, or history will welcome this superb translation of Bulgakov’s important early work.
This edition also contains an informative historical essay by Evgeny Dobrenko.

White Guard

Bulgakov, Mikhaïl

Dobrenko, Evgeny

Literary

Yale University Press

In June 2013, the Russian government passed laws prohibiting "gay propaganda," threatening jail time and fines to offenders. That same month, in spite of these harsh laws, a Russian publisher released PLAYING A PART, a young adult novel with openly gay characters. It was a brave, bold act, and now this groundbreaking story has been translated for American readers.In PLAYING A PART, Grisha adores everything about the Moscow puppet theater where his parents work, and spends as much time there as he can. But life outside the theater is not so wonderful. The boys in Grisha's class bully him mercilessly, and his own grandfather says hateful things about how he's not "masculine" enough. Life goes from bad to worse when Grisha learns that Sam, his favorite actor and mentor, is moving: He's leaving the country to escape the extreme homophobia he faces in Russia.How Grisha overcomes these trials and writes himself a new role in his own story is heartfelt, courageous, and hopeful.

Playing A Part

Children's Books

Wilke, Daria

Arts, Music & Photography

Arthur A. Levine Books

The Russian Romanov dynasty came to an abrupt end on the night of July 17, 1918, when the imperial family was executed by the Bolsheviks. Or did it? Compelling new evidence reveals that Tsarevich Alexei, the fourteen year-old son of Nicholas II and heir to the Russian throne, may have escaped the bloodshed and been adopted by a local family in a nearby village. 
Meticulously researched and documented, The Escape of Alexei details how Bolshevik soldiers bungled the execution, leading to confusion and chaos during the shooting. Young Alexei was merely wounded and unconscious when he was loaded onto the back of a truck with corpses of his murdered family and driven to the secret burial site. Falling out of the truck en route and left for dead, he was found by sympathetic soldiers who attended to the young hemophiliac's wounds and helped him escape, introducing him into a peasant family where he grew up under the name of Vasily Filatov. 
The world of Russia's heir to the throne turned upside down. Vasily Filatov became an apprentice shoemaker, and eventually a high school geography and history teacher. He married, had children, and told his family the story of the Tsarevich's escape in the third person, as historical narrative. he never explained how, as a village teacher living under the oppressive silence and censorship of the Soviet Union, he was fluent in several foreign languages, had an in-depth knowledge of the private life of the Romanov family, and an uncanny grasp of the details surrounding the 1918 execution. With the advent of perestroika in the 1980's, the Soviet archives were finally opened to the public and, to his family's amazement, many of the incredible stories that Vasily Filatov had told his with and children were revealed to the world as historical fact. 
In this startling volume, three well-respected scientists provide a convincing, thoroughly documented account of how such an extraordinary escape was possible, and how the executioners managed to cover up the fact that the body of the heir to the throne was missing. Drawing on official records and documents from Russian archive, the grisly personal accounts of soldiers who took part in the execution, and utilizing the latest scientific and forensic technology, the authors offer evidence that Alexei Romanov and Vasily Filatov were on and the same. 
Filatov died in 1988. But his widow and children provide intimate reminiscences that bring this astonishing tale to life. And 101 black-and-white personal photographs reproduced throughout the text demonstrate the remarkable physical resemblances between members of the Romanov and Filatov families.

The Escape of Alexei, Son of Tsar Nicholas II: What Happened the Night the Romanov Family Was Executed

Biographies & Memoirs

Lysenko, Igor

Egorov, Georgy

Petrov, Vadim

Bouis, Atonina W.

Historical

Harry N.Abrams, Inc.

... "The Ladies from St. Petersburg" is only the fourth book by the great Russian writer Nina Berberova to be translated into English. It contains three stories that chronologically paint a picture of the dawn of the Russian revolution, the flight from its turmoil, and the plight of an exile in a new and foreign place -- all of which Berberova knew from her personal experience. In the title story the protagonists are taking a vacation, unaware that their lives are about to be irrevocably changed. In 'Zoya Andreyevna, ' an elegant, privileged woman, in headlong flight, just one train ride ahead of the fighting, falls ill among unfriendly strangers. In 'The Big City, ' an emigrant lands in a surreal New York City, a place that is not yet, and may never be, his home.

The Ladies From St. Petersburg

New Directions

Cape of Storms, one of the great Russian writer's most fascinating novels, was published serially in 1951 in the Novyi Zhurnal -- and Nina Berberova herself, late in life, took the old emigre journals off a shelf and handed them to distinguished translator Marian Schwartz. Now this forgotten, riveting late masterpiece is available in English for the first time.
Centering on three half-sisters, Cape of Storms treats a very specific generation, born in Russia but raised in Paris: a lost generation, having suffered childhood traumas, and now neither really Russian nor truly French. The three sisters -- Dasha, Sonia, and Zai -- share the same father, Tiagin (portrayed by Berberova as an attractive, weak-willed womanizing White Russian). As the specter of war looms, and the sisters enter adulthood, each chooses a different path: Dasha marries and leaves for a bourgeois, expatriate life in colonial Africa; Sonia studies philosophy, becomes obsessed with radical politics, and ends a suicide; Zai, the youngest, an appealing adolescent, flirts with becoming an actress or a poet. It is a shattering book, which opens with an absolutely hair-raising scene of Dasha witnessing her mother's murder at the hands of Bolshevik thugs, and ends as the blitzkrieg sweeps towards Paris. Cape of Storms is unparalleled in Berberova's work for its high drama, its starkness, and many shifts of mood and viewpoint.

Cape of Storms: Novel

The greatest collection by one of the great Russian writers is now back in print. First published in Europe in the 1930s and '40s, these searing, evocative stories by the late emigre writer Nina Berberova (1901-1993) are portraits of the lives of Russian exiles in Paris on the eve of World War II. The protagonists range from housekeepers and waiters to shabby-genteel aristocrats and intellectualsbut all are united in a haunting displacement from their pasts, and all share a troubling uncertainty about the future.

The Tattered Cloak and Other Stories

Thirteen newly discovered stories by the great Russian writer, translated into English for the first time. Now added to the quartet of books by Nina Berberova that New Directions has presented for the delight of American readers is this delectable baker's dozen Billancourt Tales. These are thirteen stories (Berberova called them "Fiestas") chosen from those she wrote in Paris between 1928 and 1940 for the emigre newspaper The Latest News. In her preface Berberova mentions how she found what to write about through her discovery of Billancourt, a highly industrialized suburb of Paris. Here thousands of exiled Russians--White Guards and civilians--were finding work and establishing homes away from home with their Russian churches, schools, and small business ventures. Berberova thought the significance of the tales was in their historical and sociological aspects rather than in their artistry but the reader will demur, for these are fine stories, the kind that have led to comparisons to Chekhov. They portray a wide range of human beings and the twists and turns of their various lives. There is Ivan Pavlovich making a success of his rabbit farm but procrastinating too long about a proposal of marriage; Kondurin, happy to play the piano in restaurants rather than working as a bookkeeper--his only problem is the restaurants keep going out of business; and Gavrilovich who loses a job as an actor in the movies because the scene requires him to steal a lady's purse and even though it is make believe he just can't do it. All in all a group of very Russian tales very well told.

The Billancourt Tales

Short Stories & Anthologies

The Accompanist

A spellbinding short novel set in post-revolutionary Russia about a young girl's jealousy. The fifth book of Nina Berberova to be published by New Directions, The Accompanist, written in 1936, proved to be a literary phenomenon in Europe where it was first published. A spellbinding, short novel set in post-revolutionary RussiaThe Accompanist portrays with extraordinary sensitivity the entangled relationships of three intriguing characters. Sonechka is a talented but shy young pianist hired by a beautiful soprano (Maria Nikolaevna) and her devoted, bourgeois husband. Maria is everything Sonechka is notglamorous and flamboyant. Her voice brings with it "something immortal and indisputable, something which gives reality to the human being's dream of having wings." Doomed to live in her mentor's shadow, the young girl secretly schemes to expose the singer's infidelities. But as she awaits her chance, the diva's husband takes matters into his own hands, bringing events to a surprising resolution. This intense and beautiful little novel was published in America almost fifty years after it was written; sadly out of print for a number of years, it is a wonderfully compelling and crucial addition to Nina Berberova's growing number of published fictional works.

United States

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