Nina Serpinskaya's ‘Flirting with Life’ is a personal document that captures the daily life of the bourgeoisie and intelligentsia of the Silver Age. The author, embodying the image of a ‘starlet’ of the Moscow bohemia of the early 20th century, describes her life in art and everyday life. Her observations on the socialist transformations after the revolution are particularly interesting. The...

‘Twists of Fate and Arbitrariness’ is a book of memoirs by Grigory Grigorov, a contemporary of the 20th century, who lived an unusual, complex and eventful life. He was a witness and direct participant in the events of the first half of the century – revolutions, the Civil War; in the twenties he took a direct part in political life, many of his testimonies about the inner life of the top of...

He has always been popular, and his world literary status is now recognized: the author Hans Fallada has been completely rediscovered in recent years. It is time to take a new approach to his biography and to evaluate the rich, previously unexplored material.

The two-volume collection of documents from N.S. Khrushchev's personal archives provide one more opportunity to study one of the most remarkable and simultaneously most controlversial leader of the Soviet Union. Through his personal archives, we are able to get an image of Khrushchev not only as a great political figure, but also a private citizen and analyze his activities at various stages...

Berlin, Anfang der Dreißigerjahre. Erich Kästner befindet sich auf dem Höhepunkt seines Erfolgs. Dann die Zäsur: Als die Nazis die Macht übernehmen, entscheidet sich Kästner, in Deutschland zu bleiben. Er, der kurz zuvor noch ein Spottgedicht auf Hitler verfasst hat, muss vor Ort mitverfolgen, wie seine Bücher verbrannt werden; bald darauf erhält er Publikationsverbot. Und doch gelingt es ihm,...

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) gehörte zu den herausragenden Persönlichkeiten des deutschen Widerstands gegen den Nationalsozialismus. Der evangelische Theologe arbeitete aktiv mit an den Versuchen, das Hitler-Regime gewaltsam zu beseitigen. Im Frühjahr 1943 wurde er verhaftet; im April 1945 erhängte ihn ein SS-Standgericht kurz vor dem Eintreffen der US-Truppen.

In an innovative effort to situate Baltic testimonies to the Gulag in the broader international context of research on displacement and memory, scholars from the Baltic States, Western Europe, Canada, and the United States seek answers to the following questions: Do different groups of deportees experience deportation differently? How do the accounts of women, children and men differ in their...

A career diplomat in the Hungarian Diplomatic Service from the age of 25, Antal Ullein-Reviczky served in Vienna, Paris, Istanbul, and Zagreb from 1919-1938, when he became head of the Press Department at the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs until August 1943, obtaining the rank of Minister Plenipotentiary in December 1940. He was the right hand man of Prime Minister Miklos Kallay and...

Whence Henry Miller's title for this, one of his most appealing books; first published in 1957, it tells the story of Miller's life on the Big Sur, a section of California coast where he lived for fifteen years. Big Sur is the portrait of a place 'one of the most colorful in the U.S. 'and of the extraordinary people Miller knew there: writers (& writers who didn't write), mystics seeking...

The subject of his new book is perestroika, which ushered in a democratic era in our history. In his capacity as First Deputy Head of the International Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU, and later as an advisor to the President of the USSR, the author was largely 'inside' the events unfolding, closely interacting with the 'architects' of perestroika and aware of the reactions of...

This book is an attempt to rethink the biography of Lesya Ukrainka, in which illness and creativity, Ukraine and ‘foreigners’, politics and literature, classics and modernity, love and death are intertwined. Illness and writing. The birth of creativity from the trauma experienced at the bedside of the terminally ill Merzhynskyi. Spiritual and intellectual closeness to Drahomanov. Relations with...