Cultural Giants
Goodbye Russia: Rachmaninoff in Exile - Fiona Maddocks
In 1940 Sergei Rachmaninoff, living in exile in America, broke his creative silence and composed a swan song to his Russian homeland. What happened in those final haunted years and how did he come to write his farewell masterpiece, the Symphonic Dances? Using a wide range of sources, including important newly translated texts, Maddocks' immensely readable book conjures impressions of this enigmatic figure, his friends and the world he encountered.
Tolstoy: A Russian Life - Rosamund Bartlett
In November 1910, Count Lev Tolstoy died at a remote Russian railway station. He was eighty-two years old and had lived a remarkable and long life during one of the most turbulent periods of Russian history. Born into a privileged aristocratic family, he seemed set to join the ranks of degenerate Russian noblemen, but fighting in the Crimean War alongside rank and file soldiers opened his eyes to Russia's social problems and he threw himself into teaching the peasantry to read and write. After his marriage he wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, both regarded as two of the greatest novels in world literature. Rosamund Bartlett's exceptional biography of this brilliant, maddening and contrary man draws on key Russian sources, including the many fascinating new materials which have been published about Tolstoy and his legacy since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Tchaikovsky's Empire - Simon Morrison
Tchaikovsky is famous for all the wrong reasons. Portrayed as a hopeless romantic, a suffering melancholic, or a morbid obsessive, the Tchaikovsky we think we know is a shadow of the fascinating reality. It is all too easy to forget that he composed an empire’s worth of music, and navigated the imperial Russian court to great advantage. In this iconoclastic biography, celebrated author Simon Morrison re-creates Tchaikovsky’s complex world.
Freedom from Violence and Lies - Michael C. Fink
Anton Chekhov’s stories and plays endure as outstanding modern literary works, and his life was no less dramatic, rising from poor beginnings to become a writer, physician and philanthropist. In this new biography Michael C. Finke analyses Chekhov’s major stories, plays, and non-fiction in the context of his life, fleshing out the key features of Chekhov’s poetics of prose and drama, and revealing key continuities across genres as well as between the lesser-known early writings and the later works.
Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time - Joseph Frank
Joseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely recognised as the best biography of the writer in any language - and one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century. Now Frank's monumental, 2500-page work has been skilfully abridged and condensed in this single, highly readable volume with a new preface by the author. More than a biography in the usual sense, this is a cultural history of nineteenth-century Russia, providing both a rich picture of the world in which Dostoevsky lived and a major reinterpretation of his life and work.