RUSSIAN EMPIRE AUTHOR · FICTION · BIOGRAPHY
Nina Nikolaevna Berberova
Three things occurred on or about May 5, which is not only Cinco de Mayo in California, but Happy Birthday to me.
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Aleksandr Blok
Aleksandr Blok (1880-1921), the leader of the Symbolist Movement, was one of Russia's greatest modern poets. An inspiration to many modern Russian poets well-known in the West, most notably Pasternak, this account of his life is one of the few books on this important poet available in English. A member of the Russian aristocracy, Blok lived through a period in which a traditional world was being destroyed and a new, often alarming utopia was emerging. After years of expressing disdain for politics, he became an enthusiastic supporter of the Revolution, changing from a detached observer to a committed servant of the Russian people. This change is reflected in the shift in his work away from his early poetic mysticism to the historical vision of his most famous poem, "The Twelve.". This account of his life and his art, written by the novelist and autobiographer Nina Berberova, evokes the troubled world of the Russian intelligentsia, their illusions, and their disarray in the face of revolution. Blok's complicated emotional life, his passion for his art, and his public stature are conveyed with economy, elegance, and deep understanding.
Novels
In a career spanning five decades, Eudora Welty has chronicled her own Mississippi with a depth and intensity matched only by William Faulkner. One of the most influential writers of the century, her novels and stories blend the storytelling tradition of the South with a modernist sensibility attuned to the mysteries and ambiguities of experience. Welty explores the complex abundance of southern, and particularly southern women's, lives with an artistry that Salman Rushdie has called "impossible to overpraise.". Complete Novels gathers all of Welty's longer fiction in one volume for the first time. In The Robber Bridegroom (1942), based on a Grimm fairy tale, legendary figures from Mississippi's past, such as the keel-boat captain Mike Fink and the savage outlaws the Harp Brothers, mingle with Welty's own imaginings in a free-ranging and boisterous fantasy set along the Natchez Trace. The richly textured Delta Wedding (1946), set against a backdrop of rural Mississippi in the 1920s, vividly portrays the intricacies of family relationships in its account of the sprawling Fairchild clan. Edna Earle Ponder's unrestrained and delightfully absurd monologue, superb in its capturing of the rhythms of country speech, shows Welty's humor at its idiomatic best in The Ponder Heart (1954), a flight of invention culminating in a murder trial that becomes an occasion for exuberant comedy. The monumental Losing Battles (1970), composed over fifteen years, brings Welty's imaginative gifts to the largest canvas of her career, rendering a Depression-era family reunion with mythic scope and ebullient comic vigor. The volume concludes with The Optimist's Daughter (1972), a taut and moving story of a woman rediscovering the world of her childhood as she comes to terms with her father's death. Often considered her masterpiece, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1972.