Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva was a Russian poet. Her work is considered among some of the greatest in twentieth century Russian literature. She lived through and wrote of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow famine that followed it. In an attempt to save her daughter Irina from starvation, she placed her in a state orphanage in 1919, where she died of hunger. Tsvetaeva left Russia in 1922 and lived with her family in increasing poverty in Paris, Berlin and Prague before returning to Moscow in 1939. Her husband Sergei Efron and their daughter Ariadna (Alya) were arrested on espionage charges in 1941; her husband was executed. Tsvetaeva committed suicide in 1941. As a lyrical poet, her passion and daring linguistic experimentation mark her as a striking chronicler of her times and the depths of the human condition.
Anna Andreyevna Gorenko, better known by the pen name Anna Akhmatova, was one of the most significant Russian poets of the 20th century. She was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in 1965 and received second-most (three) nominations for the award the following year.
Anna Karenina is a novel by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy, first published in book form in 1878. Many writers consider it the greatest work of literature ever written, and Tolstoy himself called it his first true novel. It was initially released in serial installments from 1875 to 1877, all but the last part appearing in the periodical The Russian Messenger.
Judith Krantz was a magazine writer and fashion editor who turned to fiction as she approached the age of 50. Her first novel Scruples (1978) quickly became a New York Times best-seller and went on to be a worldwide publishing success, translated into 50 languages. Scruples, which describes the glamorous and affluent world of high fashion in Beverly Hills, California, helped define a new supercharged sub-genre of the romance novel - the bonkbuster or "sex-and-shopping" novel. She also fundamentally changed the publishing industry by becoming one of the first celebrity authors through her extensive touring and promotion - "a superstar of fiction". Her later books included Princess Daisy (1980), Till We Meet Again (1988), Dazzle (1990) and Spring Collection (1996). Her autobiography, Sex and Shopping: The Confessions of a Nice Jewish Girl, was published in 2000.
Zinaida Nikolayevna Gippius (Hippius) was a Russian poet, playwright, novelist, editor and religious thinker, one of the major figures in Russian symbolism. The story of her marriage to Dmitry Merezhkovsky, which lasted 52 years, is described in her unfinished book Dmitry Merezhkovsky.
Vladislav Felitsianovich Khodasevich was an influential Russian poet and literary critic who presided over the Berlin circle of Russian emigre litterateurs.
Cancer Ward is a semi-autobiographical novel by Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Completed in 1966, the novel was distributed in Russia that year in samizdat, and banned there the following year. In 1968, several European publishers published it in Russian, and in April 1968, excerpts in English appeared in the Times Literary Supplement in the UK without Solzhenitsyn's permission. An unauthorized English translation was published that year, first by The Bodley Head in the UK, then by Dial Press in the US.
Árni Jóhannsson Bergmann is an Icelandic writer, newspaper editor, literary critic, and translator of Russian literary works.
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is the first English language novel by Vladimir Nabokov, written from late 1938 to early 1939 in Paris and first published in 1941. A work centred on language and its inability to convey any satisfactory definition, it has been identified as a forerunner of the postmodernist novel.
Nina Nikolayevna Berberova was a Russian writer who chronicled the lives of Russian exiles in Paris in her short stories and novels. She visited post-Soviet Russia. Her 1965-revision of the Garnett translation of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina with Leonard J. Kent is considered the best translation so far by the academic Zoja Pavlovskis-Petit.
Maria Ignatievna Budberg, also known as Countess Benckendorff and Baroness Budberg, was a Russian adventuress and suspected double agent of OGPU and British Intelligence Service.
Her Alibi is a 1989 American romantic comedy film directed by Bruce Beresford, written by Charlie Peters and starring Tom Selleck, Paulina Porizkova, William Daniels, and James Farentino.
Gaito Gazdanov was a Russian émigré writer, living in Paris. He was of Ossetian descent; his father was from Ossetia, a North Caucasian country within the Russian Empire. Gazdanov's first stories were published in France in 1926 in Russian. His novels An Evening with Claire (1929) and The Spectre of Alexander Wolf (1948) became his most well-known works, mentioned by writers Maxim Gorky, Ivan Bunin and Vladislav Khodasevich. Gazdanov was a member of the French Resistance in occupied France. In 1953, he joined Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty as an editor. Although he learned perfect French whilst living in France, Gazdanov continued writing stories in Russian.
Ivan Sergeyevich Shmelyov was a Russian émigré writer best known for his full-blooded idyllic recreations of the pre-revolutionary past spent in the merchant district of Moscow. He was a member of the Moscow literary group Sreda.
Nina Sergeyevna Lugovskaya, was a Russian painter and theatre designer in addition to being a survivor of the GULAG. During Joseph Stalin's Great Purge, a teenaged Nina was also the author of a diary, which was discovered by the Soviet political police and used to convict her entire family of Anti-Soviet agitation. After surviving Kolyma, Nina studied at Serpukhov Art School and in 1977 joined the Union of Artists of the USSR. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Nina's diary was discovered intact inside the NKVD's file on her family. It was published in 2003, and resulted in Nina being called "the Anne Frank of Russia."
Princess Nina Georgievna of Russia,, was the elder daughter of Grand Duke George Mikhailovich and Grand Duchess Maria Georgievna of Russia. A great-granddaughter of Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, she left her native country in 1914, before World War I finished her education in England and spent the rest of her life in exile. In London in 1922, she married Prince Paul Chavchavadze, a descendant of the last king of Georgia. They had one child, Prince David Chavchavadze, born there two years later. In 1927 the family of three moved to the United States and settled in New York. In 1939 they bought a home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Princess Nina was an artist, her husband worked as an author; he wrote five books and translated several others. Their son, Prince David Chavchavadze, served with the U.S. Army during World War II and, thanks in part to his knowledge of Russian, eventually became a CIA officer. After his retirement, he wrote his memoirs and published those of his grandmother, Grand Duchess George, as well as a book about the grand dukes of Russia.
Rookery Nook is a farce by the English playwright Ben Travers based on his own 1923 novel. It was first given at the Aldwych Theatre, London, the third in the series of twelve Aldwych farces presented by the actor-manager Tom Walls at the theatre between 1923 and 1933. Several of the actors formed a regular core cast for the Aldwych farces. The play depicts the complications that ensue when a young woman, dressed in pyjamas, seeks refuge from her bullying stepfather at a country house in the middle of the night.
Pavel Pavlovich Muratov, also known as Paul Muratov or Paul Muratoff, was a Russian essayist, novelist, art historian, critic and playwright.
The Life of Arseniev is an autobiographical novel by Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin seen by many as his most important work written in emigration. The Life of Arseniev was being written and published in parts in the course of the 12 years, in 1927-1939, in France. In 1952 the New-York-based Chekhov Publishers released the first edition of the novel as a whole, entitled The Life of Arseniev. Youth.
Vazif Sirazhutdinovich Meylanov was a Soviet mathematician, social philosopher, writer, Soviet dissident and political prisoner (1980–1989). He became renowned for his critical works on theory of socialism as well as for singular endurance and uncompromising attitude towards authorities during his prison terms. After imprisonment and exile Vazif Meylanov dealt with the problem of personal freedom, examined social and political environment, dispelled stereotypes about Russian democracy and analyzed political consciousness of Russian society. Besides, he was an opponent of nationalism and Islamism, while he proposed that the idea of rule of human rights should be a basis for human relationships and strong state machine should enforce rights.
