A Russian e+a7migre+a7 writer draws a panoramic view of the cosmopolitan culture that thrived over three centuries in Russia's "gateway to the West," producing such figures as Stravinsky, Nabokov, Balanchine, and Chagall. 30,000 first printing. National ad/promo.

St. Petersburg: A Cultural History

History

solomon-volkov

Americas

The Free Press /Simon & Schuster

Balanchine's Tchaikovsky: Conversations with Balanchine on His Life, Ballet and Music

Biographies & Memoirs

Faber and Faber

With the composer's consent, the manuscript was smuggled out of Soviet Russia - but Shostakovich, fearing reprisals, stipulated that the book should not appear until after his death. Ever since its publication in 1979 it has been the subject of controversy, some suggesting that Volkov invented parts of it, but most affirming that it revealed a profoundly ambivalent Shostakovich which the world had never seen before - his life at once triumphant and tragic. Either way, it remains indispensable to an understanding of Shostakovich's life and work. Testimony is intense and fiercely ironic, both plain-spoken and outspoken.

Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov

Arts & Literature

Faber&Faber

"There is a special value to this book which none other has - namely the opportunity for two Russians with a specialized knowledge of Tchaikovsky to speak to each other on the same ground. Balanchine, as always when speaking his native tongue, expresses himself more freely here than in English. As a result, he touches upon many points that are of particular interest to his ballet public."

Balanchine's Tchaikovsky: Interviews with George Balanchine

Arts & Photography

Music

Simon&Schuster, Inc.

Long considered to be the mad dream of an imperious autocrat - the "Venice of the North, " conceived in a setting of malarial swamps - St. Petersburg was built in 1703 by Peter the Great as Russia's gateway to the West. For almost 300 years this splendid city has survived the most extreme attempts of man and nature to extinguish it, from flood, famine, and disease to civil war, Stalinist purges, and the epic 900-day siege by Hitler's armies. It has even been renamed twice, and became St. Petersburg again only in 1991. Yet not only has it retained its special, almost mystical identity as the schizophrenic soul of modern Russia, but it remains one of the most beautiful and alluring cities in the world. Every great city creates its own image in literature and art, and Petersburg is no exception. For Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoyevsky, Petersburg was a spectral city that symbolized the near-apocalyptic conflicts of imperial Russia. As the monarchy declined, allowing intellectuals and artists to flourish, Petersburg became a center of avant-garde experiment and flamboyant bohemian challenge to the dominating power of the state, first czarist and then communist. The names of the Russian modern masters who found expression in St. Petersburg still resonate powerfully in every field of art: in music, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich; in literature, Akhmatova, Blok, Mandelstam, Nabokov, and Brodsky; in dance, Diaghilev, Nijinsky, and Balanchine; in theater, Meyerhold; in painting, Chagall and Malevich; and many others, whose works are now part of the permanent fabric of Western civilization. Yet no comprehensive portrait of this thriving distinctive, and highly influential cosmopolitanculture, and the city that inspired it, has previously been attempted. Now Solomon Volkov, a Russian emigre and acclaimed cultural historian, has written the definitive cultural biography of this city and its transcendent artistic and spiritual legacy.

St Petersburg

Europe

Sinclair-Stevenson

Istorija kul·tury Sankt-Peterburga s osnovanija do nasich dnej

ЭКСМО

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