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Thread: Russian book club

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    This book involves two of my favorite entertainment genres - a post-apocalyptic dystopian future -- and video gaming!

    Metro 2033
    Dmitry Glukhovsky


    Metro 2033 is a post-apocalyptic fiction novel by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky. It is set in the Moscow Metro, where the last survivors hide after a global nuclear holocaust.

    In 2013, a nuclear war occurred, forcing a large amount of Moscow's surviving population to relocate to underground metro stations in search of refuge. Eventually, communities settled within the underground train stations and developed into independent states over time. Factions emerged, ranging from the independent peacekeepers the "Rangers of the Order", to the communist "Red Line" faction and the fascist "Fourth Reich", to the more powerful factions such as "Polis", which contained the greatest military power and the most knowledge of the past, and the "Hanza" regime, which controlled the main ring of metro stations by its sheer economic power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_2033

    Video Game inspired by book...
    Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter survival horror video game developed by 4A Games. The story is based on Dmitry Glukhovsky's novel of the same name, and is set in the ruins of Moscow following a nuclear war, where the survivors are forced to live in underground metro tunnels. Players control Artyom, a man who must save his home station from the dangers lurking within the Metro. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_2033_(video_game)
    Last edited by Cypress; 08-25-2018 at 10:33 AM.

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    How Tolstoy Can Save Putin’s Soul

    If Putin preferred Tolstoy over Dostoevsky, what a happier, more peaceful place Ukraine would be right now


    The drama being played out right now in Russia and Ukraine isn’t merely geopolitical. It’s a deep-seated drama of the national soul that’s been around for centuries. And Russian literature is the place we see it in full flower. You see, the question Vladimir Putin is grappling with is the one that recurs throughout the 19th century Russian classics: What is the source of our national greatness?

    In approaching this question, Putin, whose two favorite writers happen to be Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, has two distinct traditions to choose from: Dostoevsky’s belief in Russian exceptionalism or Tolstoy’s belief in the universality of all human experience, regardless of one’s nationality, culture, or religion. Alas, he has chosen Dostoevsky, not Tolstoy.

    Dostoevsky believed that Russia’s special mission in the world is to create a pan-Slavic Christian empire with Russia at its helm. This messianic vision stemmed from the fact that Dostoevsky thought Russia was the most spiritually developed of all the nations, a nation destined to unite and lead the others.

    This sort of triumphalist thinking was anathema to Tolstoy, who believed that every nation had its own unique traditions, none better or worse than the others. Tolstoy was a patriot—he loved his people, as is so clearly demonstrated in War and Peace, for example—but he was not a nationalist. He believed in the unique genius and dignity of every culture. One of the hallmarks of his writing from the beginning was his capacity to uncover the full-blooded truth of each one of his characters, no matter their nationality.
    continued at
    https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-to...ve-putins-soul

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    One of the best novels I have read

    Cement (Russian: Цемент) is a Russian novel by Fyodor Gladkov (1883–1958). Published in 1925, the book is arguably the first in Soviet Socialist Realist literature to depict the struggles of post-Revolutionary reconstruction in the Soviet Union
    “If we have to have a choice between being dead and pitied, and being alive with a bad image, we’d rather be alive and have the bad image.”

    — Golda Meir

    Zionism is the movement for the self-determination and statehood for the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland, the land of Israel.







    ברוך השם

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    This is on my nightstand, and next on deck for me to read.


    Solzhenitsyn's One Day: The book that shook the USSR

    In the madness of World War II, a dutiful Russian soldier is wrongfully convicted of treason and sentenced to ten years in a Siberian labor camp. So begins this masterpiece of modern Russian fiction, a harrowing account of a man who has conceded to all things evil with dignity and strength.

    One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's classic novel, was published 50 years ago this month. A short, simply-told tale about a prisoner trying to survive the Gulag - the Soviet labour camp system - it is now regarded as one of the most significant books of the 20th Century. Illuminating a dark chapter in Russian history, it is at once a graphic picture of work camp life and a moving tribute to man’s will to prevail over relentless dehumanization.

    "It was still dark, although a greenish light was brightening in the east. A thin, treacherous breeze was creeping in from the same direction. There is no worse moment than when you turn out for work parade in the morning. In the dark, in the freezing cold, with a hungry belly, and the whole day ahead of you. You lose the power of speech..."


    https://www.amazon.com/One-Day-Life-.../dp/0451531043
    https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20393894

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    Default I am not afraid of Putin

    Evidently, this is the most viewed thread in this subforum….

    This lady is reputedly one of the most popular and respected Russian authors today, I have have got "The Big Green Tent" on my reading list - it is evidently a portrayal of the Soviet dissidents of the 1950s and 60s, and an indictment of the totalitarian Soviet regime.
    https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/b...ulitskaya.html

    Lyudmila Ulitskaya: why I'm not afraid of Vladimir Putin

    Lyudmila Ulitskaya does not like to draw attention to herself. In person, she is unassuming and softly spoken, a 68-year-old grandmother with grey cropped hair and small, elegant hands. She does not consider herself exceptional. But this modest, self-effacing individual is one of Russia's foremost contemporary novelists and a leading advocate for freedom of expression. She started writing almost by accident after she was sacked from her job as a geneticist in the 1960s and accused of dissident activity by the former Soviet authorities. "I thought, quite wrongly, that scientists were freer [than artists]," she has written in the past. "Of course, all these illusions were shattered over time."

    "I'm not afraid," Ulitskaya insists, speaking through a translator. "Compared to the Stalinist era, our government now is a pussycat with soft paws … Having said that, I believe that (Russian liberal democratic reformer) Khodorkovsky is in jail because the whole society was so scared that no one stood up for his defence. There were threats: the court was afraid, the witnesses, the judge, because no one had the courage to speak up and that saddens me. That loss of dignity frustrates me because our society had only just started overcoming its fear after so many years of oppressive rule. The Russian people have once again started to be gripped by fear."

    "In Russia, there is a drastic gap between rich and poor, to the extent that I feel the country is on the brink of civil war. The salary of a civil servant can be hundreds of thousands less than that of a businessman. It causes huge irritation, especially when people show off their wealth, with all their furs and bling. I hope that the next generation will be educated more to spend their money wisely and charitably. And, for me, the first person to realise he should act like this was Khodorkovsky."

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...utin-interview

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    It basically has everything I like - a dystopian, apocalyptic future, survival horror, the Mad Max of the underground.

    Metro 2034 (The sequel to Metro 2033)
    by Dmitry Glukhovsky


    Overview
    The long-awaited sequel to the cult bestseller Metro 2033, the second volume in the Metro trilogy, Metro 2034 continues the story of survival and struggle that unfolds in the mazes of the Moscow subway after WWIII.

    As the entire civilization was wiped out by atomic bombs and the surface of the planet is polluted with neclear fallout, the only place suitable for men to live are shelters and bunkers, the largest of which is the subway system of Moscow, aka the Metro.

    The Metro Series is set following a nuclear war in the early 21st century. The remnants of humanity now live underground in the Moscow subway system. Like the city-states of ancient Greece, individual stations govern themselves sometimes banding together to form small nations. Their ideologies vary from adherence to the Koran to fascism to nonspecific mysticism to communism. They war among each other, and with the mutant beings which have risen from ashes of the old world.

    Metro 2034 takes place roughly a year after the events of Metro 2033. For better or worse, the “threat” of the dark ones has been eliminated. Those who remain must live with the decisions they made and that is not necessarily easy to do.

    There's no hope for humans to return to the surface of Earth, to repopulate the forsaken cities, and to become once again the masters of the world they used to be. So they rebuild a strange and grotesque civilization in the tunnels and at the stations of the subway. Stations become city-states that wage trade and war on each other. A fragile equilibrium is established.

    And then all can be ruined in matter of days. A new horrible threat looms that can eradicate the remains of humanity and end our era. It would take three unlikely heroes to face this menace.

    The basis of two bestselling computer games Metro 2033 and Metro Last Light, the Metro books have put Dmitry Glukhovsky in the vanguard of Russian speculative fiction.

    Metro 2034 tells a previously unknown part of the greater Metro saga that some only know from video games. Featuring blistering action, vivid and tough characters, claustrophobic tension and dark satire the Metro books have become bestsellers across the world.

    https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/met...sky/1118588634
    https://horrornovelreviews.com/2016/...o-2034-review/

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    This I recently reserved at the library.

    Life and Fate
    Vasily Semyonovich Grossman

    A book judged so dangerous in the Soviet Union that not only the manuscript but the ribbons on which it had been typed were confiscated by the state, Life and Fate is an epic tale of World War II and a profound reckoning with the dark forces that dominated the twentieth century. Interweaving an account of the battle of Stalingrad with the story of a single middle-class family, the Shaposhnikovs, scattered by fortune from Germany to Siberia, Vasily Grossman fashions an immense, intricately detailed tapestry depicting a time of almost unimaginable horror and even stranger hope. Life and Fate juxtaposes bedrooms and snipers' nests, scientific laboratories and the Gulag, taking us deep into the hearts and minds of characters ranging from a boy on his way to the gas chambers to Hitler and Stalin themselves. This novel of unsparing realism and visionary moral intensity is one of the supreme achievements of modern Russian literature (New York Review Books classics. summary).

    Grossman’s 'Life and Fate' took me three weeks to read – and three to recover

    There are novels I have re-read after 30 or 40 years that have shocked me with ideas which evidently made such a strong impression they ceased to be someone else’s thoughts and became my own. After a lifetime of reading you become formed by books; you are partly an accumulation of others’ ideas. Every time I re-read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway I see how this brief but enormously influential novel, first read in my teens, created in me the sense of lightness and excitement when walking down a London street, or how the phrase “among the cabbages” would resonate as a fragment of a sentence about memory and longing.

    But only one book had such a decisive impact that I can date to it a profound alteration in my worldview and even behaviour. I read Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate in 2003. Like a handful of other people a decade ago, I felt that I held a samizdat; no one else I knew had ever heard of it.

    Like many of my generation, I’d been shaped by ideas; by a number of -isms, socialism and feminism above all. I saw the world in terms of various us and them groupings. After reading Life and Fate they seemed to matter less. Grossman wasn’t advocating Christian saintliness, and was far from perfect in his own life. But if, even in the horror of war, you can alleviate suffering through some extraordinary action (volunteering to go to the gas chamber to hold the hand of a child so he won’t have to die alone), how easy might it be to behave with less anger, cynicism, irritation or sneery dismissiveness? And that’s what I have tried to do. Life and Fate is a daunting undertaking, but for those who finish it the experience is profound. Few novels that set out to change the world succeed; this one merely changed me.

    continued https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...asily-grossman

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    I thoroughly enjoyed the "Metro" series by this author, and was also interested to find out he is a dedicated Russian liberal activist bent on sticking it to Putin. Always worth it to hear from actual Russians who have lived their whole lives in Russia, rather than message board arm chair experts.

    Here is a pretty powerful indictment of American conservatives' favorite world leader: Vladimir Putin. There are actually a lot of parallels with Trumpism...

    Interview: Dmitry Glukhovsky on the ‘Dubious Reality’ of Putin’s Russia

    In today’s Russia, ‘one single government-corporation rules and owns the country,’ says Dmitry Glukhovsky, whose new novel ‘Text’ has sold into 14 languages and/or territories to date.

    For better or worse, Glukhovsky shows no fear in addressing the Kremlin and, as he puts it, “the ever-rotting, pretentious, cynical, and proudly immoral caste of Russian rulers.

    “I believe that we live in truly wonderful times,” Glukhovsky tells us, “wonderful” for the writers willing to see what he defines as “an epoch of not only post-truth but also post-ethic.” It’s a time in which societies, he says, “are re-enacting the biggest traumas of the last century. Dictatorships. Cold War. Fascism.

    “These are really the times when all a writer needs to do is sit down and focus carefully on the dubious reality unfolding around him. What’s the point of writing a dystopian fiction nowadays,” he asks, “when the reality is exceeding your wildest fantasies?

    “The ruling class” of the Putin era, he says, “is losing touch with the reality. This process is going faster and faster, to the complete amazement of the public. The people deserve something bigger than just propaganda news stories on Russian. “Text speaks not only of the total corruption of Russian law-enforcement, but also of the arrival of a two-caste system within the Russian society. There’s a caste of people who are ‘the system’ or who serve it: officials, police and special services, the MPs—but also propaganda journalists, organized crime kingpins, and even church leadership. In Putin’s Russia, all of these institutions are just departments of one single government-corporation that rules and owns the country.

    “Other, simpler people are like serfs in the old times. Let alone privileges, these ‘serfs’ don’t have any guarantees of such basic human rights as freedom, property, or even life.

    “The most interesting part of that phenomenon is, however, that the higher caste now wants to free itself of all moral restrictions. Wants to be free of ethics. It exists in a system of coordinates, in which there’s no good and no evil, no justice or injustice, no right and no wrong. Only strength and weakness are the opposing sides of this system, and the only value is your corporate loyalty.”

    https://publishingperspectives.com/2...urt-book-fair/

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    A strange, but weirdly poignant and beautiful body of poetry that gives of a whiff of tragedy, feminism, and melancholy. The backdrop of Stalinist persecution, tragedy, art, and creation makes, for me, a riveting tale.

    “You will hear thunder and remember me,
    And think: she wanted storms. The rim
    Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson,
    And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.”

    Anna Akhmatova



    Anna Akhmatova was one of the most significant Russian poets of the 20th century. She was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in 1965 and received second-most nominations for the award the following year

    Persecuted by the Stalinist government, prevented from publishing, regarded as a dangerous enemy , but at the same time so popular on the basis of her early poetry that even Stalin would not risk attacking her directly, Akhmatova's life was hard. Her greatest poem, "Requiem," recounts the suffering of the Russian people under Stalinism -- specifically, the tribulations of those women with whom Akhmatova stood in line outside the prison walls, women who like her waited patiently, but with a sense of great grief and powerlessness, for the chance to send a loaf of bread or a small message to their husbands, sons, lovers. It was not published in in Russia in its entirety until 1987, though the poem itself was begun about the time of her son's arrest. It was his arrest and imprisonment, and the later arrest of her husband Punin, that provided the occasion for the specific content of the poem, which is sequence of lyric poems about imprisonment and its affect on those whose loveed ones are arrested, sentenced, and incarcerated behing prison walls..

    The poet was awarded and honorary doctorate by Oxford University in 1965. Akhmatova died in 1966 in Leningrad.

    https://www.uvm.edu/~sgutman/Akhmatova.htm

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    Dovlatov - a Netflix film
    "Over six days in 1971, brilliant writer Sergei Dovlatov encounters maddening barriers to publishing his work under the repressive Soviet regime/"

    “If Hemingway is to believed, poverty is an invaluable school for a writer. Poverty makes a man clear-sighted. And so on. It's interesting that Hemingway realized this only when he became rich.” - Sergei Dovlatov

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    Default Russian book club

    I am looking for a book on the Sumerian civilization as translated from the tablets found. Not so much in story form, more like just the translations. Does a book like that exist? I just picked up the Epic of Gilgamesh because thats all they had no-corporate-stores-here lol. I am all for ordering here or somewhere else. i want to know about their way of life and their belief system as translated from the tabs.

    Thanks in advance

    ps- book on tape/audio book would be awesome

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    “I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances — from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death.” - Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

    The Gulag Archipelago (Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, 1973)
    I dedicate this
    to all those who did not live
    to tell it.
    And may they please forgive me
    for not having seen it all
    nor remembered it all,
    for not having divined all of it.
    (Dedication)

    “For years, I have with a reluctant heart withheld from publication this already completed book: my obligation to those still living outweighed my obligation to the dead. But now that State Security has seized the book anyway, I have no alternative but to publish it immediately.”
    (Author's Note, Gulag Archipelago)

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    Quote Originally Posted by Cypress View Post
    This is on my nightstand, and next on deck for me to read.


    Solzhenitsyn's One Day: The book that shook the USSR

    In the madness of World War II, a dutiful Russian soldier is wrongfully convicted of treason and sentenced to ten years in a Siberian labor camp. So begins this masterpiece of modern Russian fiction, a harrowing account of a man who has conceded to all things evil with dignity and strength.

    One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's classic novel, was published 50 years ago this month. A short, simply-told tale about a prisoner trying to survive the Gulag - the Soviet labour camp system - it is now regarded as one of the most significant books of the 20th Century. Illuminating a dark chapter in Russian history, it is at once a graphic picture of work camp life and a moving tribute to man’s will to prevail over relentless dehumanization.

    "It was still dark, although a greenish light was brightening in the east. A thin, treacherous breeze was creeping in from the same direction. There is no worse moment than when you turn out for work parade in the morning. In the dark, in the freezing cold, with a hungry belly, and the whole day ahead of you. You lose the power of speech..."


    https://www.amazon.com/One-Day-Life-.../dp/0451531043
    https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20393894
    its a darkly beautiful tale

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    Quote Originally Posted by evince View Post
    its a darkly beautiful tale
    Day in the Life was a compelling read, and it is great to run across someone else who actually read it.

    To me, the thing that is so striking, so arresting about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is his fierce integrity. He always said that spending time in the Gulag forced him to clarify and distill his priorities and ethical values. He claimed he was prepared for imprisonment, and even death, in order to play his role in advancing the truth. And he put his money where his mouth is, so his claims are not empty rhetoric.

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    he was truly a beautiful human being


    I was him for a short while


    It helped from me intellectually


    It was actually more intense then just reading it


    acting can be like that if you immerse your self truly

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