A Girl Grew Up In Russia

Elizaveta Fen's father was a provincial governor in Bielorussia. The family lived in the Russian equivalent of Edwardian comfort. Fen shares her story of her days in a boarding school and her aspirations to be a writer and to fall in love--properly in love, not into an adolescent infatuation. She concludes with the day she set forth to meet "real life" at a university in St. Petersburg, in 1917.

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography The prizewinning memoir of one of the world’s great writers, about coming of age as an enemy of the people and finding her voice in Stalinist Russia Born across the street from the Kremlin in the opulent Metropol Hotel—the setting of the New York Times bestselling novel A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles—Ludmilla Petrushevskaya grew up in a family of Bolshevik intellectuals who were reduced in the wake of the Russian Revolution to waiting in bread lines. In The Girl from the Metropol Hotel, her prizewinning memoir, she recounts her childhood of extreme deprivation—of wandering the streets like a young Edith Piaf, singing for alms, and living by her wits like Oliver Twist, a diminutive figure far removed from the heights she would attain as an internationally celebrated writer. As she unravels the threads of her itinerant upbringing—of feigned orphandom, of sleeping in freight cars and beneath the dining tables of communal apartments, of the fugitive pleasures of scraps of food—we see, both in her remarkable lack of self-pity and in the two dozen photographs throughout the text, her feral instinct and the crucible in which her gift for giving voice to a nation of survivors was forged. “From heartrending facts Petrushevskaya concocts a humorous and lyrical account of the toughest childhood and youth imaginable. . . . It [belongs] alongside the classic stories of humanity’s beloved plucky child heroes: Edith Piaf, Charlie Chaplin, the Artful Dodger, Gavroche, David Copperfield. . . . The child is irresistible and so is the adult narrator who creates a poignant portrait from the rags and riches of her memory.” —Anna Summers, from the Introduction

Russian Mosaic is the true story of a young girl from a Russian mining town above the Arctic Circle, whose coming of age is marked by tragedy and hardship, but ultimately survival. She spent her childhood and college years under the structured control of the state. With always a bit of rebellion for the lack of freedom and self-expression, she learned to "play along" to get by. As a young adult, she witnessed the fall of communism and the Soviet Union, and with it, the change of lifestyle for all Russians. The daughter of a miner father and an accountant mother, Olga endures a number of ordeals that would have broken others less resilient. From the untimely passing of her father, and through a variety of early life experiences, she learns from her mother not to rely on others, but to be self-sufficient and to make her own way in the world. She not only survives but succeeds and writes with the hope of inspiring other women who face adversity in life.

The Russian Revolution and Civil War in the years 1917 to 1921 is one of the most widely studied periods in history. It is also somewhat inevitably one that has generated a huge flow of literature in the decades that have passed since the events themselves. However, until now, historians of the revolution have had no dedicated bibliography of the period and little claim to bibliographical control over the literature. The Russian Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921offers for the first time a comprehensive bibliographical guide to this crucial and fascinating period of history. The Bibliography focuses on the key years of 1917 to 1921, starting with the February Revolution of 1917 and concluding with the 10th Party Congress of March 1921, and covers all the key events of the intervening years. As such it identifies these crucial years as something more than simply the creation of a communist state.

Most books about the Soviet Union focus on politics, food shortages, or lack of democratic freedoms. This collection portrays everyday experiences of a young girl growing up in the Soviet Union of the 1970's and 1980's. Childhood can be a magical and innocent time oblivious to political regimes and problems.That's what these twelve stories strive to convey.

Little Prairie Girl Growing Up: Moving! is a riveting and inspiring sequel to Little Prairie Girl. This book is sure to hold the interest of young and old alike, with tales of Clara's adolescent years from the "good ole days." Follow Clara and her family as she moves from the Prairies of Manitoba to the fruit farming area of southern Ontario. The author grew up hearing her mother, Clara Durksen, tell these stories about her growing up years and God's faithfulness. This is the second book in the Little Prairie Girl Series. Also available are Little Prairie Girl (Item #3534), Little Pennsylvania Dutch Boy (Item #3657) and Little Pennsylvania Dutch Boy Growing Up (item #4108). (152pp. illus. Masthof Press, 2013.)

A Modern History of Russian Childhood examines the changes and continuities in ideas about Russian childhood from the 18th to the 21st century. It looks at how children were thought about and treated in Russian and Soviet culture, as well as how the radical social, political and economic changes across the period affected children. It explains how and why childhood became a key concept both in Late Imperial Russia and in the Soviet Union and looks at similarities and differences to models of childhood elsewhere. Focusing mainly on children in families, telling us much about Russian and Soviet family life in the process, Elizabeth White combines theoretical ideas about childhood with examples of real, lived experiences of children to provide a comprehensive overview of the subject. The book also offers a comprehensive synthesis of a wide range of secondary sources in English and Russian whilst utilizing various textual primary sources as part of the discussion. This book is key reading for anyone wanting to understand the social and cultural history of Russia as well as the history of childhood in the modern world.