Research Guides: Russian Collection Research Guide: Books

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Select Print Books

The Cambridge Companion to Modern Russian Culture by Nicholas Rzhevsky (Editor); Dean Worth (Contribution by); Dmitry S. Likhachev (Contribution by); Mark Bassin (Contribution by); Pierre Hart (Contribution by); Abbott Gleason (Contribution by); Catriona Kelly (Contribution by); David Bethea (Contribution by); John Bowlt (Contribution by) 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, folk ethos and popular culture, literature, music, theatre, art, and film. A chronology and guides to further reading are also provided. The Companion offers both historical orientation for the central processes of Russian culture and introductory surveys of the arts in their modern context. Overall, the volume reveals, for students, academic researchers and all those interested in Russia, the dilemmas, strengths, and complexities of the Russian cultural experience.
Call Number: Main DK32.C33 1998
Publication Date: 1998
Dostoevsky's Unfinished Journey by Robin Feuer Miller How does Dostoevsky's fiction illuminate questions that are important to us today? What does the author have to say about memory and invention, the nature of evidence, and why we read? How did his readings of such writers as Rousseau, Maturin, and Dickens filter into his own novelistic consciousness? And what happens to a novel like Crime and Punishment when it is the subject of a classroom discussion or a conversation? In this original and wide-ranging book, Dostoevsky scholar Robin Feuer Miller approaches the author's major works from a variety of angles and offers a new set of keys to understanding Dostoevsky's world. Taking Dostoevsky's own conversion as her point of departure, Miller explores themes of conversion and healing in his fiction, where spiritual and artistic transfigurations abound. She also addresses questions of literary influence, intertextuality, and the potency of what the author termed "ideas in the air"; For readers new to Dostoevsky's writings as well as those deeply familiar with them, Miller offers lucid insights into his works and into their continuing power to engage readers in our own times.
Call Number: Main PG3328.Z6 M4815 2007
Publication Date: 2007
Fortress Dark and Stern: The Soviet Home Front During World War II by Wendy Z. Goldman; Donald Filtzer The first history of the Soviet home front experience during World War II and of the civilians who paid a very heavy price for total war and played a critical role in the global victory over fascism.After Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, German troops conquered the heartland of Soviet industry and agriculture and turned the occupied territories into mass killing fields. The country's survival hung in the balance.In Fortress Dark and Stern, Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald Filtzer tell the epic tale of the Soviet home front during World War II. Against the backdrop of the Red Army's early retreats and regained offensive after Stalingrad, civilians contended with draconian state directives, teeming black markets,petty thievery, and official corruption, displaying spirited defense efforts and selfless heroism. In one of the greatest wartime feats in history, Soviet workers rapidly evacuated factories, food, and people thousands of miles to the east. After long and dangerous journeys in unheated boxcars, theybuilt a new industrial base beyond the reach of German bombers. As the Soviet state reached the height of its power, imposing military discipline and sending millions of people to work thousands of miles from home, ordinary people withstood starvation, epidemics, and horrific living conditions tosupply the front and make the Allied victory possible. This book examines the dark and painful war years rom a new perspective, telling the stories of evacuees, refugees, teenaged and women workers, runaways from work, prisoners, and deportees.Based on a vast trove of new archival materials, Fortress Dark and Stern reveals a history of suffering, sacrifice, and ultimate triumph largely unknown to Western readers.
Call Number: Main DK273.G585 2021
Publication Date: 2021
Gorbachev: His Life and Times by William Taubman "From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Khrushchev: The Man and his Era comes the definitive volume on one of the most important and controversial figures of the 20th century. When Mikhail Gorbachev became its leader in March 1985, the USSR was still one of the world's two superpowers. By the end of his tenure six years later, the Communist system was dismantled, the cold war was over and, on 25th December 1991, the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist. While not solely responsible for this remarkable upheaval, he set decisive changes in motion. Assessments of Gorbachev could not be more polarised. In the West, he is regarded as a hero. In Russia, he is widely hated by those who blame him for the collapse of the USSR. Admirers marvel at this vision and courage. Detractors, including many of his Kremlin comrades, have accused him of everything from naivete to treason."--Provided by publisher.
Call Number: Main DK290.3.G67 T39 2017
Publication Date: 2017
The Modern Russian Theater: a Literary and Cultural History by Nicholas Rzhevsky This comprehensive and original survey of Russian theater in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first encompasses the major productions of directors such as Meyerhold, Stanislavsky, Tovostonogov, Dodin, and Liubimov that drew from Russian and world literature. It is based on a close analysis of adaptations of literary works by Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Blok, Bulgakov, Sholokhov, Rasputin, Abramov, and many others."The Modern Russian Stage" is the result of more than two decades of research as well as the author's professional experience working with the Russian director Yuri Liubimov in Moscow and London. The book traces the transformation of literary works into the brilliant stagecraft that characterizes Russian theater. It uses the perspective of theater performances to engage all the important movements of modern Russian culture, including modernism, socialist realism, post-moderninsm, and the creative renaissance of the first decades since the Soviet regime's collapse.
Call Number: Main PN2724.R97 2009
Publication Date: 2009
The Rise of the Russian Novel: Carnival, Stylization, and Mockery of the West by David W. Gasperetti Overturning the view of early Russian prose fiction as a pale imitation of European models, this discussion locates the origins of the Russian novel in 18th century indigenous writing. Tracing the novel's development, it analyzes the prose of Fedor Emin, Mikhail Chulkov and Matvei Komarov.
Call Number: Main PG3095.G37 1998
Publication Date: 1998
Russia's Dangerous Texts: Politic Between the Lines by Kathleen F. Parthé Russia’s Dangerous Texts examines the ways that writers and their works unnerved and irritated Russia’s authoritarian rulers both before and after the Revolution. Kathleen F. Parthé identifies ten historically powerful beliefs about literature and politics in Russia, which include a view of the artistic text as national territory, and the belief that writers must avoid all contact with the state. Parthé offers a compelling analysis of the power of Russian literature to shape national identity despite sustained efforts to silence authors deemed subversive. No amount of repression could prevent the production, distribution, and discussion of texts outside official channels. Along with tragic stories of lost manuscripts and persecuted writers, there is ample evidence of an unbroken thread of political discourse through art. The book concludes with a consideration of the impact of two centuries of dangerous texts on post-Soviet Russia.
Call Number: Main PG2987.P58 P37 2004
Publication Date: 2008
Russia in Revolution by S. A. Smith Longlisted for the 2018 Cundill Prize in HistoryThe Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed the face of the Russian empire, politically, economically, socially, and culturally, and also profoundly affected the course of world history for the rest of the twentieth century. Now, to mark the centenary of this epochal event, historian Steve Smithpresents a panoramic account of the history of the Russian empire, from the last years of the nineteenth century, through the First World War and the revolutions of 1917 and the establishment of the Bolshevik regime, to the end of the 1920s, when Stalin simultaneously unleashed violentcollectivization of agriculture and crash industrialization upon Russian society.Drawing on recent archivally-based scholarship, Russia in Revolution pays particular attention to the varying impact of the Revolution on the various groups that made up society: peasants, workers, non-Russian nationalities, the army, women and the family, young people, and the Church.In doing so, it provides a fresh way into the big, perennial questions about the Revolution and its consequences: why did the attempt by the tsarist government to implement political reform after the 1905 Revolution fail; why did the First World War bring about the collapse of the tsarist system;why did the attempt to create a democratic system after the February Revolution of 1917 not get off the ground; why did the Bolsheviks succeed in seizing and holding on to power; why did they come out victorious from a punishing civil war; why did the New Economic Policy they introduced in 1921fail; and why did Stalin come out on top in the power struggle inside the Bolshevik party after Lenin's death in 1924.A final chapter then reflects on the larger significance of 1917 for the history of the twentieth century - and, for all its terrible flaws, what the promise of the Revolution might mean for us today.
Call Number: Main DK265 .S5293 2017
Publication Date: 2017
Russian Art: From Neoclassicism to the Avant-Garde, 1800-1917 by Dmitri V. Sarabianov
Call Number: Main N6987.S27 1990
Publication Date: 1990
Russian Exploration, from Siberia to Space: A History by Brian Bonhomme In the history of geographical discovery and exploration, a well-known cast of European characters and events takes center stage. While the importance of achievements by Columbus, Cortes, Magellan, Cook, Lewis and Clark, and Neil Armstrong remains unassailable, the participation of Russia in the European era of exploration, conquest, expansion, and colonization deserves equal attention. This study provides a narrative survey and critical analysis of a rich but overlooked tradition of geographical exploration by Russians and others in Russian service since 1580. Following Russian pioneers across Siberia, Alaska, Brazil, Hawaii and the Pacific, Central Asia, Australasia, the Arctic and Antarctic, and into space, this work establishes Russia in the history of world exploration and connects the Russian experience of exploration to Russian national identity past and present.
Call Number: Main G292.B66 2012
Publication Date: 2012
Russian Music Since 1917: Reappraisal and Rediscovery by Patrick Zuk (Editor); Marina Frolova-Walker (Editor) This ground-breaking collection of essays, which arises from a unique collaboration between leading scholars based on either side of the former Iron Curtain, is the first attempt to appraise the current state of research on the development of Russian art music since the 1917 Revolution. Part I provides a comprehensive critical overview of recent research both in Russia itself and outside it, outlining the principal changes in approach and emphasis. The remaining essays engage with topics of key importance, including: the envisionings of music's place in Soviet and post-Soviet cultural life; the effects of state controls on musical creativity and performance; musical institutions; the Russian musical diaspora; and the transition to the post-Soviet period. The contributions vividly illustrate the transformation of scholarship in the field since glasnost. In the USSR, scholarship had been seriously hindered by censorship, while in the West, Soviet music and musical life tended to be assessed from entrenched aesthetic and ideological standpoints engendered by the Cold War. The dramatically changed climate of the post-Soviet period has made possible a more objective and informed discussion of many issues, and has led scholars to question the validity of 'top-down' models of the interaction between musicians and the state that had previously been predominant. The book will be not only be a valuable resource for university courses on Russian music at undergraduate and postgraduate level, but essential reading for all those interested in Soviet and post-Soviet culture.
Call Number: Main AS122.B7 v.209
Publication Date: 2017
The Russia Reader: History, Culture, Politics by Adele Marie Barker (Editor); Bruce Grant (Editor) Letters recording the reactions of ordinary Russians to the Revolution as events unfolded in 1917, an account of the day-to-day scramble to make a living after the end of the Soviet Union, and excerpts from a sixteenth-century manual instructing elite Muscovites on proper household management--The Russia Reader brings these and many other selections together in this introduction to the history, culture, and politics of the world's largest country, from the earliest written accounts of the Russian people to today. Conveying the texture of everyday life alongside experiences of epic historical events, the book is filled with the voices of men and women, rulers and revolutionaries, peasants, soldiers, literary figures, émigrés, journalists, and scholars. Most of the selections are by Russians, and thirty are translated into English for the first time. Illustrated with maps, paintings, photographs, posters, and cartoons, The Russia Reader incorporates song lyrics, jokes, anecdotes, and folktales, as well as poems, essays, and fiction by writers including Akhmatova, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, and Tolstoi. Transcripts from the show trials of major Party figures and an account of how staff at the Lenin Library in Moscow were instructed to interact with foreigners are among the many selections based on personal memoirs and archival materials only recently made available to the public. From a tenth-century emissary's description of his encounters in Kyivan Rus', to a scientist's recollections of her life in a new research city built from scratch in Siberia during the 1950s, to a novelist's depiction of the decadence of the "New Russians" in the 2000s, The Russia Reader is an extraordinary introduction to a vast and varied country.
Call Number: Main DK18.R874 2010
Publication Date: 2010
The Soviet Elite from Lenin to Gorbachev: The Central Committee and Its Members, 1917-1991 by Evan Mawdsley; Stephen White This ground-breaking book examines the Soviet ruling elite over the entire period of Communist rule. It serves as a collective biography of nearly two thousand people who served on the Communist Party's Central Committee from 1917 to 1991. The book is based on archival research, only available after the collapse of communism, and extensive interviews with former Central Committee members.
Call Number: Main JN6549.E9 M39 2000
Publication Date: 2000

Library of Congress Call Numbers

Books in UH Libraries are shelved by Library of Congress call numbers. Most of the Russian Collection books and serials can be found on the second floor of Hamilton Library.

DK1 - DK949.5 - History of Russia, Soviet Union, Former Soviet Republic

PG1 - PG7925 - Slavic Language and Literature

Hamilton Library Call Number Locations

Hamilton Library Call Number Locations

Hamilton Library Floor Plans

Hamilton Library Floor Plans

Interlibrary Loan (ILL)

Articles and books not found in our library can be requested through the Interlibrary Loan Office.

Select E-Books

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy; Gary Saul Morson (Editor); Marian Schwartz (Translator) Tolstoy produced many drafts of "Anna Karenina." Crafting and recrafting each sentence with careful intent, he was anything but casual in his use of language. His project, translator Marian Schwartz observes, "was to bend language to his will, as an instrument of his aesthetic and moral convictions." In her magnificent new translation, Schwartz embraces Tolstoy's unusual style--she is the first English language translator ever to do so. Previous translations have departed from Tolstoy's original, "correcting" supposed mistakes and infelicities. But Schwartz uses repetition where Tolstoy does, wields a judicious cliche when he does, and strips down descriptive passages as he does, re-creating his style in English with imagination and skill. Tolstoy's romantic Anna, long-suffering Karenin, dashing Vronsky, and dozens of their family members, friends, and neighbors are among the most vivid characters in world literature. In the thought-provoking Introduction to this volume, Gary Saul Morson provides unusual insights into these characters, exploring what they reveal about Tolstoy's radical conclusions on romantic love, intellectual dishonesty, the nature of happiness, the course of true evil, and more. For readers at every stage--from students first encountering Anna to literary professionals revisiting the novel--this volume will stand as the English reader's clear first choice.
Call Number: E-book
Publication Date: 2014
Colonizing Russia's Promised Land: Orthodoxy and Community on the Siberian Steppe by Aileen Friesen Russia's political elite promoted the colonization of Siberia as a means of transforming the Russian empire into an international economic power, making possible the exploitation of Siberia's resources, particularly its rich farmland. The state's invitation to resettle was readily accepted in many communities in European Russia. Millions of peasant-settlers trekked across the empire for the opportunity to find affordable land, a luxury that their villages could not offer. Friesen highlights the role of Orthodoxy as a cultural force in transforming Russia's imperial periphery through settler colonialism; the religious meaning ascribed by settlers, clergymen, and state officials to these new settlements and the surround territory; and the cracks of modern Russian society, which could not be glossed over by the nationalistic rhetoric of Orthodox-driven settler colonialism.
Call Number: E-book
Publication Date: 2020
Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics by Nina L. Khrushcheva Vladimir Nabokov’s "Western choice”--his exile to the West after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution--allowed him to take a crucial literary journey, leaving the closed nineteenth-century Russian culture behind and arriving in the extreme openness of twentieth-century America. In Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics, Nina L. Khrushcheva offers the novel hypothesis that because of this journey, the works of Russian-turned-American Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) are highly relevant to the political transformation under way in Russia today. Khrushcheva, a Russian living in America, finds in Nabokov’s novels a useful guide for Russia’s integration into the globalized world. Now one of Nabokov’s "Western” characters herself, she discusses the cultural and social realities of contemporary Russia that he foresaw a half-century earlier. In Pale Fire; Ada, or Ard&or; Pnin; and other works, Nabokov reinterpreted the traditions of Russian fiction, shifting emphasis from personal misery and communal life to the notion of forging one’s own "happy” destiny. In the twenty-first century Russia faces a similar challenge, Khrushcheva contends, and Nabokov’s work reveals how skills may be acquired to cope with the advent of democracy, capitalism, and open borders.
Call Number: E-book / Main PG3476.N3 Z6987 2007
Publication Date: 2008
Liberal Ideas in Tsarist Russia: From Catherine the Great to the Russian Revolution by Vanessa Rampton Liberalism is a critically important topic in the contemporary world as liberal values and institutions are in retreat in countries where they seemed relatively secure. Lucidly written and accessible, this book offers an important yet neglected Russian aspect to the history of political liberalism. Vanessa Rampton examines Russian engagement with liberal ideas during Russia's long nineteenth century, focusing on the high point of Russian liberalism from 1900 to 1914. It was then that a self-consciously liberal movement took shape, followed by the founding of the country's first liberal (Constitutional-Democratic or Kadet) party in 1905. For a brief, revelatory period, some Russians - an eclectic group of academics, politicians and public figures - drew on liberal ideas of Western origin to articulate a distinctively Russian liberal philosophy, shape their country's political landscape, and were themselves partly responsible for the tragic experience of 1905.
Call Number: E-book
Publication Date: 2020
Lifestyle in Siberia and the Russian North by Joachim Otto Habeck (Editor) "Lifestyle in Siberia and the Russian North breaks new ground by exploring the concept of lifestyle from a distinctly anthropological perspective. Showcasing the collective work of ten experienced scholars in the field, the book goes beyond concepts of tradition that have often been the focus of previous research, to explain how political, economic and technological changes in Russia have created a wide range of new possibilities and constraints in the pursuit of different ways of life. Each contribution is drawn from meticulous first-hand field research, and the authors engage with theoretical questions such as whether and how the concept of lifestyle can be extended beyond its conventionally urban, Euro-American context and employed in a markedly different setting. Lifestyle in Siberia and the Russian North builds on the contributors’ clear commitment to diversifying the field and providing a novel and intimate insight into this vast and dynamic region. This book provides inspiring reading for students and teachers of Anthropology, Sociology and Cultural Studies and for anyone interested in Russia and its regions. By providing ethnographic case studies, it is also a useful basis for teaching anthropological methods and concepts, both at graduate and undergraduate level. Rigorous and innovative, it marks an important contribution to the study of Siberia and the Russian North."
Call Number: E-book
Publication Date: 2020
On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics by Sheila Fitzpatrick "Stalin was the unchallenged dictator of the Soviet Union for so long that most historians have dismissed the officials surrounding him as mere yes-men and political window dressing. On Stalin's Team overturns this view, revealing that behind Stalin were a group of loyal men who formed a remarkably effective team with him from the late 1920s until his death in 1953. Drawing on extensive original research, Sheila Fitzpatrick provides the first in-depth account of this inner circle and their families, vividly describing how these dedicated comrades-in-arms not only worked closely with Stalin, whom they both feared and admired, but also constituted his social circle. Readers meet the wily security chief Beria, whom the rest of the team quickly had executed following Stalin's death; Stalin's number-two man, Molotov, who continued on the team even after his wife was arrested and exiled; the charismatic Ordzhonikidze, who ran the country's industry with entrepreneurial flair; Andreev, who traveled to provincial purges while listening to Beethoven on a portable gramophone; and Khrushchev, who finally disbanded the team four years after Stalin's death. Among the book's surprising findings is that Stalin almost always worked with the team on important issues, and after his death the team managed a brilliant transition to a reforming collective leadership. Taking readers from the cataclysms of the Great Purges and World War II to the paranoia of Stalin's final years, On Stalin's Team paints an entirely new picture of Stalin within his milieu--one that transforms our understanding of how the Soviet Union was ruled during much of its existence"-- Provided by publisher.
Call Number: E-book / Main DK268.S8 F593 2015
Publication Date: 2015
Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator by Oleg V. Khlevniuk; Nora Seligman Favorov (Translator) The most authoritative and engrossing biography of the notorious dictator ever written Josef Stalin exercised supreme power in the Soviet Union from 1929 until his death in 1953. During that quarter-century, by Oleg Khlevniuk's estimate, he caused the imprisonment and execution of no fewer than a million Soviet citizens per year. Millions more were victims of famine directly resulting from Stalin's policies. What drove him toward such ruthlessness? This essential biography, by the author most deeply familiar with the vast archives of the Soviet era, offers an unprecedented, fine-grained portrait of Stalin the man and dictator. Without mythologizing Stalin as either benevolent or an evil genius, Khlevniuk resolves numerous controversies about specific events in the dictator's life while assembling many hundreds of previously unknown letters, memos, reports, and diaries into a comprehensive, compelling narrative of a life that altered the course of world history. In brief, revealing prologues to each chapter, Khlevniuk takes his reader into Stalin's favorite dacha, where the innermost circle of Soviet leadership gathered as their vozhd lay dying. Chronological chapters then illuminate major themes: Stalin's childhood, his involvement in the Revolution and the early Bolshevik government under Lenin, his assumption of undivided power and mandate for industrialization and collectivization, the Terror, World War II, and the postwar period. At the book's conclusion, the author presents a cogent warning against nostalgia for the Stalinist era.
Call Number: E-book
Publication Date: 2015

Reference Books

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Russia and the Former Soviet Union by Archie Brown (Editor); Michael C. Kaser (Editor); Gerald S. Smith (Editor) This book is an essential reference guide to Russia and the post-Soviet world. Contains comprehensive coverage of geography, peoples, history, politics, international relations, economy, literature and the arts. Thematically arranged to provide a structured introduction to the subject. Fifty-two colour maps and charts. Ready-reference tables, information panels, further reading guides, and glossary.
Call Number: Main DK14.C35 1994
Publication Date: 1994