Russia

Hardcover. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards, 199 pages. The artists' books made in Russia between 1910 and 1915 are like no others. Unique in their fusion of the verbal, visual, and sonic, these books are meant to be read, looked at, and listened to. Painters and poets--including Natalia Goncharova, Velimir Khlebnikov, Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Mayakovsky--collaborated to fabricate hand-lithographed books, for which they invented a new language called zaum (a neologism meaning 'beyond the mind') that was distinctive in its emphasis on 'sound as such' and its rejection of definite logical meaning. At the heart of this volume are close analyses of two of the most significant and experimental futurist books: Mirskontsa (Worldbackwards) and Vzorval' (Explodity). In addition, Nancy Perloff examines the profound difference between the Russian avant-garde and Western art movements, including futurism. Still sealed in publisher's shrinkwrap.

Hardcover. Milano, Skira, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 320 pages. Hardcover. Profusely illustrated in full color. Clean, tight copy. This catalog of over three hundred artworks related to the Saisons Russes between 1909 and 1929 is the official companion to an exhibition in Monte Carlo. The legendary productions are brought to life through stage designs, costumes, paintings, sculptures, photographs, and programs. The artwork comes from a wide variety of public and private collections, including the Fokine collection in the St. Petersburg Theatre Museum.

Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 353 pages, illustrated throughout in color and b&w. Light edgewear and two tiny closed tears to pictorial dust jacket and faint foxing to edges of textblock. Otherwise, a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. New York, Aurora, 1st, Aurora, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 459 pages, 1430 illustrations, including 705 plates in full color. Light edgewear and rubbing to dust jacket with small scratch to front cover. Excellent reference copy.

Hardcover. NY, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1st, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 128 pages, b&w illustrations, some color. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Zurich, Scalo, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 205 pages, color photos throughout by Mayer. Edited by Gunther Doeker-Mach. Like new in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Color photographs of native peoples of Russian Far East hunting, fishing, reindeer herding and their environment. Includes three essays describing problems of these peoples arising from tension between Russian colonisation and their struggle to preserve their identity.

Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, When Bill Browder's young Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was beaten to death in a Moscow jail, Browder made it his life's mission to go after his killers and make sure they faced justice. The first step of that mission was to uncover who was behind the $230 million tax refund scheme that Magnitsky was killed over. As Browder and his team tracked the money as it flowed out of Russia through the Baltics and Cyprus and on to Western Europe and the Americas, they were shocked to discover that Vladimir Putin himself was a beneficiary of the crime. As law enforcement agencies began freezing the money, Putin retaliated. He and his cronies set up honey traps, hired process servers to chase Browder through cities, murdered more of his Russian allies, and enlisted some of the top lawyers and politicians in America to bring him down. Putin will stop at nothing to protect his money. As Freezing Order reveals, it was Browder's campaign to expose Putin's corruption that prompted Russia's intervention in the 2016 US presidential election. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. In 2008, when Michael McFaul was asked to leave his perch at Stanford and join an unlikely presidential campaign, he had no idea that he would find himself at the beating heart of one of today's most contentious and consequential international relationships As President Barack Obama's adviser on Russian affairs, McFaul helped craft the United States' policy known as "reset" that fostered new and unprecedented collaboration between the two countries And then, as US ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014, he had a front-row seat when this fleeting, hopeful moment crumbled with Vladimir Putin's return to the presidency This riveting inside account combines history and memoir to tell the full story of US-Russia relations from the fall of the Soviet Union to the new rise of the hostile, paranoid Russian president From the first days of McFaul's ambassadorship, the Kremlin actively sought to discredit and undermine him, hassling him with tactics that included dispatching protesters to his front gates, slandering him on state media, and tightly surveilling him, his staff, and his family. 506 pages, illustrations, clean copy.

Hardcover. Dunlop Art Gallery, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial cloth, 169 pages. Illustrated in color and b&w. Text in English and French. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 229 pages, b&w illustrations. The searing accounts of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Evgeniia Ginsberg and Varlam Shalamov opened the world's eyes to the terrors of the Soviet Gulag. But not until now has there been a memoir of life inside the camps written from the perspective of an actual employee of the Secret police. In this riveting memoir, superbly translated by Deborah Kaple, Fyodor Mochulsky describes being sent to work as a boss at the forced labor camp of Pechorlag in the frozen tundra north of the Arctic Circle. Only twenty-two years old, he had but a vague idea of the true nature of the Gulag. What he discovered was a world of unimaginable suffering and death, a world where men were starved, beaten, worked to death, or simply executed. Mochulsky details the horrific conditions in the camps and the challenges facing all those involved, from prisoners to guards. He depicts the power struggles within the camps between the secret police and the communist party, between the political prisoners (most of whom had been arrested for the generic crime of "counterrevolutionary activities") and the criminal convicts. And because Mochulsky writes of what he witnessed with the detachment of the engineer that he was, readers can easily understand how a system that destroyed millions of lives could be run by ordinary Soviet citizens who believed they were advancing the cause of socialism. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 294 pages. Emily Johnson has translated and edited a fascinating collection of letters written by Arsenii Formakov, a Latvian Russian poet, novelist, and journalist, during two terms in Soviet labor camps, 1940 to 1947 in Kraslag and 1949 to 1955 in Kamyshlag and Ozerlag. This correspondence, which Formakov mailed home to his family in Riga, provides readers with a firsthand account of the workings of the Soviet penal system and testifies to the hardships of daily life for Latvian prisoners in the Gulag. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Praeger, Revised Ed., 1958, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Dust jacket spine faded, worn. 530 pages.

Hardcover. New Delhi, Calcutta, 1st, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 485 pages. Underlining in brown felt tip on pages 129-133. Otherwise clean, tight copy. Dust jacket shows standard wear with sunfaded spine.

Hardcover. NY, Penguin Press, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Elena Kostyuchenko's unrelenting attempt to document her country as experienced by those whom it systematically and brutally erases: village girls recruited into sex work, queer people in the outer provinces, patients and doctors at a Ukrainian maternity ward, and reporters like herself. Here is Russia as it is, not as we imagine it. The result is a singular portrait of a nation, and of a young woman who refuses to be silenced. In March 2022, as a correspondent for Russia's last free press, Novaya Gazeta, Kostyuchenko crossed the border into Ukraine to cover the war. It was her mission to ensure that Russians witnessed the horrors Putin was committing in their name. She filed her pieces knowing that should she return home, she would likely be prosecuted and sentenced to up to fifteen years in prison. Yet, driven by the conviction that the greatest form of love and patriotism is criticism, she continues to write. I Love Russia stitches together reportage from the past fifteen years with personal essays, assembling a kaleidoscopic narrative that Kostyuchenko understands may be the last work from her homeland that shell publish for a long time, perhaps ever. It exposes the inner workings of an entire nation as it descends into fascism and, inevitably, war. She writes because the threat of Putin's Russia extends beyond herself, beyond Crimea, and beyond Ukraine. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Clarion Books, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. A young Jewish girl from a middle-class Russian family recalls the events of her childhood, both good and bad, in a small village just before the Revolution of 1917. Though classed as fiction, this reads more like a vivid memoir of the author's childhood. B&w drawings by Gennady Schikarioff.

NY, Holiday House, 1st , 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Color illustrations by Robert Sauber. Frolya, a talking dove, weaves a beautiful rug for the archer Frol, which leads to a series of exciting adventures for the archer when the wicked czar covets the dove, adventures that lead Frol to the magical Land of I-Know-Not-Where.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, The MIT Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 326 pages, illustrated in color, b&w. How Constructivist artists in Russia between 1923 and 1925 developed a counterproposal to capitalism's commodity fetish by producing objects meant to be "comrades" in the creation of an egalitarian socialist culture. Very good in a bright dust jacket.

Hardcover. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in dust jacket, 297 pages. James W. Heinzen's work fills a significant gap in the extensive historiography of the New Economic Policy (NEP) . The book studies the organization and staffing of NKZem RSFSR, offers some memorable portraits of its leading figures, especially its head, Alexander Petrovich Smirnov, and delves into the complexity of policy making in this era and the clash of institutional interests that had a major impact on policy. Heinzen makes a convincing case that Smirnov and the specialists in NKZem RSFSR were one of the major sources of ideas and policies for the 'Rightists' within the party leadership. The book is distinguished by its thoroughness, and by its cool and balanced judgment. This study brings out the full complexity of the Bolshevik regime, its dilemmas, and its internal contradictions. Clean copy, light fading to dj spine.

Hardcover. New York, Da Capo Press, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 327 pages. Hardcover. Gilt title on spine. Dust jacket unclipped. B/w illustrations throughout. In excellent condition, clean inside and out. Remainder mark on bottom edge. Binding tight, looks barely read.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 600 pages, in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket. In this substantial work, Berberova, a renowned writer who left her homeland along with many compatriots in the wake of the 1917 Revolution, chronicles the travails she encounters in poverty-stricken Russia, poverty-stricken Berlin, and poverty-stricken Paris, where she lived from 1925-1950.

Softcover. NY, Guggenheim Museum, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 267 pages, illustrated throughout in color and b&w. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to wrappers. In 1915, Kazimir Malevich changed the future of modern art when his experiments in painting led the Russian avant-garde into pure abstraction. He called his innovation Suprematism--an art of pure geometric form meant to be universally comprehensible regardless of cultural or ethnic origin. His Suprematist masterpiece, White Square on White (1920-27), continues to inspire artists throughout the world. Focused exclusively on this defining moment in Malevich's career, Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism features nearly 120 paintings, drawings and objects, among them several recently discovered masterworks. In addition, the book includes previously unpublished letters, essays and diaries, along with essays by international scholars, who shed new light on this popular figure and his devotion to the spiritual in art.

Hardcover. New York, The New Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 515 pages. Hardcover. Gray cover boards, gilt title on spine. In nice shape, Dust jacket unclipped, has just a touch of age yellow. Edges show a little soil (shelfwear). Binding very tight, clean inside. Very good condition.

Hardcover. The New Press, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 448 pages. Viktor Koretsky (1909-1998) was a leading Soviet artist and the acknowledged master of the Soviet photographic poster. With a long and prolific career that spanned the early Stalin era through to the onset of Glasnost, Koretsky produced some of the most memorable images of World War II and the Cold War from the point of view of the USSR. The first comprehensive catalogue of Koretsky's work in any language, this stunning and richly illustrated album provides an essential introduction to the major examples of Koretsky's artistic output, including posters, original designs, and other political graphics. An introductory essay by noted art historian Erika Wolf provides a fascinating general overview of the Soviet political poster, situating Koretsky's work historically, politically, and artistically. The core of the volume is a series of two hundred full-color plates, each accompanied by a concise commentary that clarifies its significance; arranged chronologically, these works of political propaganda art brilliantly record the shifting political and artistic circumstances of the distinctive eras of their production&mdas;the first Five-Year Plan, World War II, Postwar Stalinism, the Thaw, the Brezhnev era, and the twilight of Soviet authoritarian culture. Richly annotated with related primary source quotations, a chronology, and a glossary of Soviet culture, Koretsky is a groundbreaking contribution to our understanding of this influential and little-understood artist.

Hardcover. NY, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 542 pages with index. In Leningrad: Siege and Symphony, Brian Moynahan sets the composition of Shostakovich's most famous work against the tragic canvas of the siege itself and the years of repression and terror that preceded it. In vivid and compelling detail he tells the story of the cruelties heaped by the twin monsters of the twentieth century on a city of exquisite beauty and fine minds, and of its no less remarkable survival. Clean copy.