Hardcover. NY, Aperture, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. An acclaimed photographer's images and the words of Russia's foremost writers combine in an intimate record of the contemporary Russian experience: an intractable culture in the throes of irrevocable change. 30 color and 70 black-and-white photographs. This handsome photo album with Morath's own foreword and captions depicts a world to which many Russians in the grip of post-Soviet nostalgia long to return. Morath's Russia is devoid of Soviet excresence: no ugly concrete apartment blocks, Stalinist skyscrapers, or exhortative banners appear. Landscapes and street scenes are poetic and largely deserted. Sidetrips to Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Lithuania, and Uzbekistan are subsumed under "Russian culture." The people shown are mainly artists and intellectuals, and portraits of embattled dissident writers (Nadezhda Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky) testify to the moral support Morath and her husband Arthur Miller offered them in the 1960s. The album includes fond letters from Mandelstam and poet Andrei Voznesensky, as well as Olga Andreyev Carlisle's reminiscence of her 1967 trip to the Soviet Union with Morath. Clean copy.
