Paper victory. Three short stories. Annotated Russian reader (Level B1-B2)

Annotated Russian reader for intermediate (B1-B2) level includes three great short stories by Ludmila Ulitskaia: Paper victory, Cabbage Miracle, and Nails. Each story includes side glosses, stress marks, comments, exercises, and a full glossary. Ludmila Ulitskaya, one of Russia's most acclaimed contemporary prose writers, began her literary career with a book of stories for children, and later published a series of stories about young girls growing into adolescence during the post-Stalin period of the 1950s. The three short stories in this reader provide a window into the Soviet childhood experience in the years 1945-49 when the country was just beginning to recover from the devastation and hardships caused by the Second World War. The stories are semi-autobiographical, based on Ulitskaya's childhood memories, and each portrays child protagonists facing challenging situations in everyday life. Ulitskaya's detailed descriptions of landscape (litter-strewn courtyard), objects (worn out overshoes), sounds (the tapping of a sewing machine), smells (of sheepskin and horse harness), weather (the biting cold and overcast sky of late fall, the melting dirty snow of early spring), evoke the atmosphere and harsh realities of Russian life in the early postwar years; yet each of these stories ends on an optimistic note, engendering hope for a better future.