Notes from the Underground is a novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Notes is considered by many to be one of the first existentialist novels. It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as the Underground Man) who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg. The first part of the story is told in monologue form, or the underground man's diary, and attacks emerging Western philosophy, especially Nikolay Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?. The second part of the book is called "Apropos of the Wet Snow", and describes certain events that, it seems, are destroying and sometimes renewing the underground man, who acts as a first person, unreliable narrator and anti-hero. In the 1860s, Russia was beginning to absorb the ideas and culture of Western Europe at an accelerated pace, nurturing an unstable local climate. There was especially a growth in revolutionary activity accompanying a general restructuring of tsardom where liberal reforms, enacted by an unwieldy autocracy, only induced a greater sense of tension in both politics and civil society. Many of Russia's intellectuals were engaged in a debate with the Westernizers on one hand, and the Slavophiles on the other, concerned with favoring importation of Western reforms or promoting pan-Slavic traditions to address Russia's particular social reality. Even though in 1861, Tsar Alexander emancipated the serfs, Russia was still very much a post-medieval, traditional peasant society.
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"1984 - the novel marking the end of communism." George Orwell's 1984 revolves around Winston Smith, an office worker who performs censorship duties in Oceania's Ministry of Truth as a small cog in the wheel of a monstrous state apparatus. For years, doubts have been gnawing at him about the legitimacy of the system in which even a blink of the eye can cost him his life. The novel begins with the first step towards putting this initially purely intellectual resistance into action: Winston opens a diary. He subsequently falls in love with a young female colleague, and together they begin a love affair that, in the dictatorship that invades every aspect of life, is in itself an act of high treason. Even though they have different views on the society they live in, they are united by the rejection of its narrow moral corset and the desire for individual freedom and, not least, a right to love and feel. While Winston understands HOW the machinery of tyranny works, he does not understand WHY the massive effort of its surveillance and repressive apparatus is undertaken. When they decide to seek contact with the underground opposition and eventually end up in the hands of the repression apparatus of the state, Winston learns the true background of Oceania's society. Until his death, George Orwell was a convinced socialist - all the greater was the effect his work, published in 1949, had on the political left of the time. On the political left, the Soviet Union was seen as the realisation of Marx's ideas, the workers' paradise that would free the enslaved masses from their shackles. Orwell was one of the few leftists of his time who dared to shake this narrative. Under the impression of the undeniable terror of Stalinist rule and its cynical, opportunistic cooperation with fascist and capitalist foreign countries, he criticised the hypocrisy and inhumanities of the real communism with Animal Farm and 1984. George Orwell - Animal Farm Animal Farm is a dystopian fable by George Orwell, published in 1945, about the uprising of the animals of an English farm against the rule of their human owner, who neglects and exploits them. After initial successes and incipient prosperity, the pigs increasingly take over and eventually establish a tyranny worse than the one the animals tried to shake off. While the majority of the political left of the 1940s still regarded the Soviet Union as the realisation of Karl Marx's ideas, George Orwell's bestseller breaks with this view by very humorously depicting the development of Russia or the Soviet Union from the late reign of Tsar Nicholas II to post-war Stalinism in the form of this modern fable.
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Christian Wolmar expertly tells the story of the Trans-Siberian railway from its conception and construction under Tsar Alexander III, to the northern extension ordered by Brezhnev and its current success as a vital artery. He also explores the crucial role the line played in both the Russian Civil War -Trotsky famously used an armoured carriage as his command post - and the Second World War, during which the railway saved the country from certain defeat. Like the author's previous railway histories, it focuses on the personalities, as well as the political and economic events, that lay behind one of the most extraordinary engineering triumphs of the nineteenth century.
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Sir Winston Churchill's paternal grandmother and the mother of Randolph Churchill, the 7th Duchess of Marlborough, has been a slight figure in many other people's biographies yet her own story as a member of a remarkable family has never been fully told, until now. Frances Anne Emily Vane-Tempest-Stewart's family background, as well as her own life, is steeped in great historical names and occasions. She was the eldest daughter of the 3rd Marquess and Marchioness of Londonderry, two well-known, glamorous individuals: her father was a military hero, second in command to Wellington in the Napoleonic wars, and her mother one of the wealthiest women in England. Her godfather was the Duke of Wellington, her uncle Lord Castlereagh, British Foreign Secretary, Queen Victoria was a lifelong personal friend and contemporary and her political circle included both Disraeli and Gladstone. Tsar Alexander I of Russia was a mysterious, romantic figure among the shadows of her childhood. Frances' arrival at Blenheim Palace in 1843 as the bride of John Winston, 7th Marquess of Blandford resulted in the great ancestral seat's regeneration as a family home, as a social and political focus for the life of the nation and for the neighbourhood of Woodstock in Oxfordshire. Frances the Duchess gave loyal support not only to her husband but also her younger son, Randolph, in his political career, and became a stable and abiding influence on her famous grandson, Winston Churchill, shaping his character, ambitions and later achievements. Her own crowning achievement, fully and dramatically told in this book, is her humanity, leadership and skill, through her Famine Relief Committtee, in averting the effects of the Irish potato famine of 1879, which threatened to repeat the wholesale loss of life of the famine of the 1840s, when she was Vicereine of Ireland. Margaret Elizabeth Forster has found new, original material and unpublished family photographs from the Marlborough personal archives to recount this absorbing, remarkable biography and to restore a most gracious woman to her proper place at Blenheim.
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What did it mean when Vladimir Putin stepped down from president to prime minister of Russia in 2008 and bounced to the top again in 2013? The Putin-Medvedev clique of mega-rich ex-KGB men and lawyers call their state machine kontora – the firm – and run it as though they own all the shares. They command the largest armed forces in Europe, equipped with half the world's nuclear warheads. Their air force regularly flies nuclear capable Tupolev Tu-95 strategic bombers into British airspace to analyse our radar defences and time in-the-air reaction. In a frightening foretaste of future warfare, the Kremlin launched a cyberattack on neighbouring Estonia in 2007 that crashed every computer and silenced every mobile phone, bringing the country to a complete halt. Was this just Tsar Vladimir bullying a small independent neighbour state that could not hit back – or a rehearsal for something far bigger? People call Putin's power strategy 'the new Cold War'. Author Douglas Boyd argues that it is the same one as before, fought with potent new weapons: the energy resources on which half of Europe now depends, and which can be turned off at Moscow's whim. Recounted often in the words of participants, The Kremlin Conspiracy is the chilling story of 1,000 years of bloodshed that made the Russians the way they are. Today, Ukraine. Tomorrow? The past points the way, for the men running the Kremlin 'firm' are driven by the same motivation as Ivan the Terrible and Catherine the Great.
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Le tsar Alexandre se rend en Angleterre où il observe les merveilles de l'industrie florissante de ce royaume et reçoit moult présents que son fidèle serviteur le cosaque Platov n'a de cesse de dénigrer. L'un d'entre eux pourtant les stupéfie : une puce dansante entièrement mécanique. Les orfèvres anglais sont-ils à ce point supérieurs à ceux de l'empire du tsar ? Il en va de l'honneur des plus doués des artisans russes, dont parmi eux le Gaucher bigle de Toula. Présenté par un narrateur narquois qui ne semble pas tout comprendre aux événements, à mi-chemin entre légende populaire et conte satirique, <i>Le Gaucher</i> témoigne avec malice et humour des rapports de la Russie avec l'Ouest. <br> <br>EXTRAIT <br> <br>Les Anglais sont stupéfaits et se décrochent des bourrades. <br>— Aïe, aïe ! Nous avons fait une gaffe ! <br>Le Souverain dit à Platov d’une voix triste : <br>— Pourquoi les as-tu rendus si penauds ? à présent j’ai beaucoup de peine pour eux. Partons. <br>Ils grimpèrent d’heureux chef dans le même cabriolet bi-siège et puis s’en furent, et ce jour-là le Souverain alla au bal, tandis que Platov asséchait un verre de kizliarki encore plus grand, avant de s’endormir d’un solide sommeil de Cosaque. <br>Il était certes content d’avoir mis les Anglais en vilaine posture, et placé l’artisan de Toula au point de mire, mais il ressentait aussi du dépit : <br>« Quelle raison a donc le Souverain de se chagriner ? pensait Platov. C’est ce que je ne comprends pas ! » et perdu dans ces réflexions, par deux fois il se leva, se signa, et but de l’eau-de-vie, jusqu’à tant qu’il sombrât, par force, dans un sommeil de plomb. <br>Mais les Anglais, dans le même temps, ne dormaient guère non plus, parce qu’eux aussi étaient tout tourneboulés. Pendant que le Souverain s’amusait au bal, ils lui manigancèrent une nouvelle surprise assez étonnante pour ôter à Platov toute envie de rigoler. <br>
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« La cave à vin de Staline » est tout simplement LE livre sur le vin le plus fascinant de ces dernières années. Il s’agit d’une énorme cave souterraine de plus de 40 000 bouteilles, cachée en Géorgie, l’ancien état soviétique. Cette cave appartenait à Josef Staline et provenait du dernier tsar de Russie Nicolas II et de son père Alexandre III, confisquée après l’exécution du Tsar et sa famille. Elle a été cachée par Staline à Tbilissi en Géorgie près de son lieu de naissance alors qu’il craignait qu’Hitler n’envahisse la Russie et ne confisque la collection de vins. La collection compte plus de 200 bouteilles de Château d'Yquem, d’autres grands sauternes et des meilleurs grands châteaux de Bordeaux, des millésimes de plus de 150 ans. Un trésor vinicole probablement inégalé dans le monde. Et ce qui rend l’histoire incroyablement passionnante, c’est sa découverte par un couple de marchands de vins de Sydney dont les nombreuses péripéties font de ce livre un vrai thriller.
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The second part of the London Decameron covers the sixth day with a viewing of Hampton Court Palace. The center of the stories is the splendid court of Henry VIII and his wives. The evening in a nostalgically styled Russian restaurant in the style of the Tsar era turns to the beginning of the Russian campaign. The seventh day begins with a visit to Windsor Castle.
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