_______________'Curtis spent a decade trying to negotiate her way past possessive Soviet archivists, and the result of her persistence is the most comprehensive selection of personal documents so far available in any language' - Simon Franklin, Times Literary Supplement'Ingeniously structured ... an absorbing and, at times, uplifting book' - Robert Russell, Modern Language Review'An engagin...

Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940) has become the most popular Russian writer of the twentieth century, even though his works were banned for decades after his death due to the repressive Soviet censorship of literature. His great novel, The Master and Margarita (published only in 1973), was written in complete secrecy during the 1930s for fear of the writer being arrested and shot. In her revelatory new biography J.A.E. Curtis provides a fresh account of Bulgakov’s idyllic childhood an...

The legendary Russian biography series, The Lives of Remarkable People, has played a significant role in Russian culture from its inception in 1890 until today. The longest running biography series in world literature, it spans three centuries and widely divergent political and cultural epochs: Imperial, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Russia. The authors argue that the treatment of biographical figures in the series is a case study for continuities and changes in Russian national identity over ti...

How and why does the stage, and those who perform upon it, play such a significant role in the social makeup of modern Russia, Ukraine and Belarus? In New Drama in Russian, Julie Curtis brings together an international team of leading scholars and practitioners to tackle this complex question.New Drama, which draws heavily on techniques of documentary and verbatim writing, is a key means of protest in the Russian-speaking world; since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, ...