Вручение 2018 г.
Страна: Великобритания
Дата проведения: 2018 г.
Книжная премия Пушкинского дома
Лауреат
Alexis Peri
0.0
In September 1941, two and a half months after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, the German Wehrmacht encircled Leningrad. Cut off from the rest of Russia, the city remained blockaded for 872 days, at a cost of almost a million civilian lives, making it one of the longest and deadliest sieges in modern history.
The War Within chronicles the Leningrad blockade from the perspective of those who endured the unendurable. Drawing on 125 unpublished diaries written by individuals from all walks of Soviet life, Alexis Peri tells the tragic story of how citizens struggled to make sense of a world collapsing around them. Residents recorded in intimate detail the toll taken on minds and bodies by starvation, bombardment, and disease. For many, diary writing became instrumental to survival―a tangible reminder of their humanity. The journals also reveal that Leningraders began to reexamine Soviet life and ideology from new, often critical perspectives.
Leningrad’s party organization encouraged diary writing, hoping the texts would guide future histories of this epic battle. But in a bitter twist, the diarists became victims not only of Hitler but also of Stalin. The city’s isolation from Moscow made it politically suspect. When the blockade was lifted in 1944, Kremlin officials censored publications describing the ordeal and arrested hundreds of Leningrad’s wartime leaders. Many were executed. Diaries―now dangerous to their authors―were concealed in homes, shelved in archives, and forgotten. The War Within recovers these lost narratives, shedding light on one of World War II’s darkest episodes
Родрик Брейтвейт
0.0
In 1945, the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and old ideas of warfare came to an end. This book tells how the power of the atom was harnessed to produce weapons capable of destroying human civilisation.
There were few villains in the story. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, dedicated scientists cracked the secrets of nature, dutiful military men planned to use the bomb in war, politicians contemplated with a potentially intolerable decision. Patriotic citizens acquiesced in the idea that their country needed the ultimate means of defence. Some tried to grapple with the unanswerable question: what end could possibly be served by such a fearsome means? Those who protested went unheard. None wanted to start a nuclear war, but all were paranoid. The danger of war by accident or misjudgement was never entirely absent.
Rodric Braithwaite, author of bestsellers Moscow 1941 and Afgantsy, paints a vivid and thought-provoking portrait of this intense period in history. Its implications are as relevant today as they ever were, as ignorant and thoughtless talk about nuclear war begins to spread once more.
Оливье Ролен
0.0
Alexei is the highly respected head of the Soviet Union’s meteorology department. He is also a loving family man, devoted to his wife and his four-year-old daughter Eleonora. But one fateful morning in 1934, less than a year after being hailed by Stalin as a national hero, Alexi is suddenly arrested and exiled to a gulag. With thousands of other political prisoners, he spends his remaining years on an island in the frozen north, under vast skies and surrounded by water that was, for more than six months of the year, a sheet of motionless ice.
Olivier Rolin masterfully pieces together Alexei’s story and his eventual horrifying fate, drawing on an archive of letters and beautiful drawings of the natural world which Alexei sent home to his family. The Meteorologist is the fascinating and deeply moving account of an innocent man caught up in the brutality of Soviet paranoia.
Юрий Слезкин
4.1
The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment. Written in the tradition of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Grossman's Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, Yuri Slezkine's gripping narrative tells the true story of the residents of an enormous Moscow apartment building where top Communist officials and their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalin's purges. A vivid account of the personal and public lives of Bolshevik true believers, the book begins with their conversion to Communism and ends with their children's loss of faith and the fall of the Soviet Union.
Completed in 1931, the House of Government, later known as the House on the Embankment, was located across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The largest residential building in Europe, it combined 550 furnished apartments with public spaces that included everything from a movie theater and a library to a tennis court and a shooting range. Slezkine tells the chilling story of how the building's residents lived in their apartments and ruled the Soviet state until some eight hundred of them were evicted from the House and led, one by one, to prison or their deaths.
Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, and featuring hundreds of rare photographs, The House of Government weaves together biography, literary criticism, architectural history, and fascinating new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies, and reigns of terror. The result is an unforgettable human saga of a building that, like the Soviet Union itself, became a haunted house, forever disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared.
Уильям Таубман
4.0
In the first comprehensive biography of Mikhail Gorbachev, William Taubman shows how a peasant boy clambered to the top of a system designed to keep people like him down, found common ground with America’s arch-conservative president Ronald Reagan, and permitted the USSR and its East European empire to break apart without using force to preserve them. Drawing on interviews with Gorbachev himself, transcripts and documents from the Russian archives, and interviews with Kremlin aides and adversaries, Taubman’s intensely personal portrait extends to Gorbachev’s remarkable marriage to a woman he deeply loved. Nuanced and poignant, yet unsparing and honest, this sweeping account has all the amplitude of a great Russian novel
Лучшая переведенная русская книга
Лауреат
Victoria Lomasko
4.0
What does it mean to live in Russia today? What is it like to grow up in a forgotten city, to be a migrant worker or to grow old and seek solace in the Orthodox church?
For the past eight years, graphic artist and activist Victoria Lomasko has been travelling around Russia and talking to people as she draws their stories. She spent time in dying villages where schoolteachers outnumber students; she stayed with sex workers in the city of Nizhny Novgorod; she went to juvenile prisons and spoke to kids who have no contact with the outside world; and she attended every major political rally in Moscow.
The result is an extraordinary portrait of Russia in the Putin years -- a country full of people who have been left behind, many of whom are determined to fight for their rights and for progress against impossible odds. Empathetic, honest, funny, and often devastating, Lomasko's portraits show us a side of Russia that is hardly ever seen.
