Memoirs, diaries, essays on politics, music, and art.

It's an almost unbelievable story. The author, who was only discovered in her eighties, became one of the most successful and translated Czech writers almost overnight. He won the State Prize for Literature for his short story collection Želary, and a highly successful film was made based on Joz Hanula''s novella, which was nominated for an Oscar. But who is Kveta Legátová (real name Vera...

Pyotr Alekseevich Kropotkin (1842-1921) is an amazing, but in some ways very typical figure in Russian history: a prince from an old family who became a revolutionary, a scholar and encyclopedist immersed in politics, an anarchist who sharply criticized violence and the ‘Red Terror’. He became famous as a geographer and explorer of the North, a historian and philosopher, a literary critic and...

Kokkinaki was perhaps the leading Soviet test pilot setting many world and Soviet records. He worked for several design bureaus, including theIlyushin Design Bureau , where he served as its chief test pilot. He also established the shortest flight route between Europe and the United States. He died in 1985.

From Amazon: John Fowles gained international recognition in 1963 with his first published novel, The Collector, but his labor on what may be his greatest literary undertaking, his journals, commenced over a decade earlier. Fowles, whose works include The Maggot, The French Lieutenant's Woman, and The Ebony Tower, is among the most inventive and influential English novelists of the twentieth...

Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Milov wrote their report ‘Luzhkov: The Results’ at the end of 2009. Luzhkov and his wife, billionaire developer Elena Baturina, sued Nemtsov over it, but they failed to refute most of the facts presented by the ‘perpetually dissenting’ opposition figure. And when Yuri Luzhkov began to obviously irritate President Medvedev – especially after the mayor refused to...

This true story is a multifaceted picture of modern Russia and Europe, a financial thriller, and a tragicomedy of how life throws together human fates and ambitions to keep this world revolving. Dmitry Pototskiy, a Moscow ranking official, abandons his career in government and returns to the business world. Now his challenge is to find access to unadvertised, high-yield Trade Programs that...

Christened Reginald Dwight, he was a shy boy with Buddy Holly glasses who grew up in the London suburb of Pinner and dreamed of becoming a pop star. By the age of twenty-three he was performing his first gig in America, facing an astonished audience in his bright yellow dungarees, a star-spangled T-shirt, and boots with wings. Elton John had arrived and the music world would never be the same...

The Ninth Circle is a story about punitive psychiatry that arose in the USSR at the initiative of F. Dzerzhinsky in the early 1920s. Decades passed, and thousands of completely innocent people sat in Soviet special hospitals and nothing changed. The journalist and human rights activist Viktor Davydov knows firsthand about the existence of special psychiatric hospitals: he himself was their...