"Tenderfoot Days" is a memoir written by George Robert Bird that tells the story of his youth in the American West during the late 19th century.Born in Iowa in 1862, Bird moved with his family to Kansas and then to Colorado as a young boy. Growing up in the rugged and untamed wilderness of the West, Bird had many adventures and experiences that shaped his life and worldview."Tenderfoot Days" is a collection of stories and anecdotes from Bird's youth, including his encounters with Native Am...

This book is neither a History nor a Topography of the Territory of Utah in the early seventies of the last century. The volume is due to the experiences of an outsider who tried to be impartial in his views and sympathies. The personal note, of course, rings in this record of those past days. No onslaught is made on the "wild and woolly" west, nor on the eccentric religion of the majority of the people. Through much peril and privation, the wild wastes of the Territory had been occupied b...

This is a memoir by a non-Mormon about his experiences in the prospecting camps of Utah at the turn of the 19th century. Written as a first-person perspective by an outsider, it gives a sympathetic account of the Mormons, but also brings up some darker aspects about their history. It's also pretty racist towards Native Americans, so, as always with these old books, please bear in mind the context and the era in which it was written.

In the last thirty years of the Soviet Communist project, Viktor Koretsky's art struggled to solve an enduring riddle: how to ensure or restore Communism's moral health through the production of a distinctively Communist vision. In this sense Koretsky's art demonstrates what an "avant-garde late Communist art" would have looked like if we had ever seen it mature. Most striking of all, Koretsky was pioneering the visual languages of Benetton and MTV at a time when the iconography of interra...

In the last thirty years of the Soviet Communist project, Viktor Koretsky's art struggled to solve an enduring riddle: how to ensure or restore Communism's moral health through the production of a distinctively Communist vision. In this sense Koretsky's art demonstrates what an “avant-garde late Communist art” would have looked like if we had ever seen it mature. Most striking of all, Koretsky was pioneering the visual languages of Benetton and MTV at a time when the iconography of interra...

Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, Demons, The Idiot – the complex and prolific Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) is responsible for some of our greatest literary works and most enduring characters. He is acknowledged by critics as a pre-eminent writer of psychological fiction and a precursor of twentieth-century existentialism.Set in the troubled political and social world of nineteenth-century Russia, this book describes how Dostoevsky’s...

The films of Andrei Tarkovsky have been revered as ranking on a par with the masterpieces of Russia's novelists and composers. His work, from films such as Ivan's Childhood, Andrei Rublev, Solaris, Mirror, Nostalgia and Sacrifice, has had an enormous influence on the style of contemporary European film, with its open narrative structures and slow, pensive mood; yet Tarkovsky has remained an elusive subject for reflection and analysis. T...

After Stalin's death in 1953, the Soviet Union dismantled the enormous system of terror and torture that he had created. But there has never been any Russian ban on former party functionaries, nor any external authority to dispense justice. Memorials to the Soviet victims are inadequate, and their families have received no significant compensation. This book's premise is that late Soviet and post-Soviet culture, haunted by its past, has produced a unique set of memorial practices. More tha...

Russia is a dominant force in the world, whose culture has been shaped by its unique position on the margins of both East and West. As Russia faces new cultural challenges from outside its national boundaries, this volume introduces Russian culture in all its rich diversity, including the historical conditions that helped shape it and the arts that express its highest achievements. Newly commissioned essays by leading scholars explore language, religion, geography, ideological structures, ...

Written at the height of Stalin's first "five-year plan" for the industrialization of Soviet Russia and the parallel campaign to collectivize Soviet agriculture, Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit registers a dissonant mixture of utopian longings and despair. Furthermore, it provides essential background to Platonov's parody of the mainstream Soviet "production" novel, which is widely recognized as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century Russian prose. In addition to an overview of the...

The Guggenheim Reader Series: Russia is the inaugural title in a new e-book series that brings together scholarly essays on prominent themes. The Guggenheim has a rich history of exploring Russian art and the avant-garde in particular; this anthology collects the most insightful and influential essays from exhibition catalogues such as The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 19151932 (1992) and Russia! Nine Hundred Years of Masterpieces and Master Col...

Soviet literature in general and Soviet children’s literature in particular have often been labeled by Western and post-Soviet Russian scholars and critics as propaganda. Below the surface, however, Soviet children’s literature and culture allowed its creators greater experimental and creative freedom than did the socialist realist culture for adults. This volume explores the importance of children’s culture, from literature to comics to theater to film, in the formation of Soviet social i...