Through Siberia by Accident

Author: Dervla Murphy
Publisher: John Murray Pubs Limited
ISBN: 9780719566646
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Book Description
Through Siberia by Accident is a book about a journey that didn't happen - and what happened instead. Dervla Murphy never had any intention of spending three months in the vast territories of Siberia. Instead she had planned to go to Ussuriland, because it appealed to her as a place free from tourism. But by accident, or rather because she had an accident - a painful leg injury -, she found herself stymied in Eastern Siberia, a place she knew very little about. Although hardly able to walk, her subsequent experiences, in an unexpected place, and in an incapacitated state, provided many pleasant surprises. Above all she was struck by the extraordinary hospitality, generosity and helpfulness of the Siberians who made this strange phenomenon - a maimed Irish babushka - so welcome in their towns and homes. This book is an extraordinary story of fortitude and resourcefulness as Dervla Murphy finds friendship and culture in a seemingly monotonous, bleak and inhospitable place far from what we know as 'civilised'. Through Siberia by Accident is a voyage of Siberian self-discovery.

Travels in Siberia

Author: Ian Frazier
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429964316
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 541

Book Description
A Dazzling Russian travelogue from the bestselling author of Great Plains In his astonishing new work, Ian Frazier, one of our greatest and most entertaining storytellers, trains his perceptive, generous eye on Siberia, the storied expanse of Asiatic Russia whose grim renown is but one explanation among hundreds for the region's fascinating, enduring appeal. In Travels in Siberia, Frazier reveals Siberia's role in history—its science, economics, and politics—with great passion and enthusiasm, ensuring that we'll never think about it in the same way again. With great empathy and epic sweep, Frazier tells the stories of Siberia's most famous exiles, from the well-known—Dostoyevsky, Lenin (twice), Stalin (numerous times)—to the lesser known (like Natalie Lopukhin, banished by the empress for copying her dresses) to those who experienced unimaginable suffering in Siberian camps under the Soviet regime, forever immortalized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. Travels in Siberia is also a unique chronicle of Russia since the end of the Soviet Union, a personal account of adventures among Russian friends and acquaintances, and, above all, a unique, captivating, totally Frazierian take on what he calls the "amazingness" of Russia—a country that, for all its tragic history, somehow still manages to be funny. Travels in Siberia will undoubtedly take its place as one of the twenty-first century's indispensable contributions to the travel-writing genre.

Through Siberia

Author: Henry Lansdell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Exiles
Languages : en
Pages : 450

Book Description

We Sang Through Tears

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Concentration camps
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Book Description
First-hand accounts written by people deported from Latvia to Siberia in the 1940's and 1950's.

Shallow Graves in Siberia

Author: Michael Krupa
Publisher: Birlinn
ISBN: 0857900234
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Book Description
Michael Krupa was born into a poor family in south-west Poland, and in his teens was accepted into a Jesuit seminary. He ran away before taking his final vows and joined the army. Soon afterwards, the German tanks rolled into Poland and easily defeated her antiquated forces - the Polish cavalry were armed with sabres. Krupa survived Hitler's invasion, but was arrested in Soviet-occupied eastern Poland and accused of spying. After enduring torture in Moscow's notorious Lubianka prison, he was sentenced to ten years' corrective labour and deported to the Pechora Gulag. Most prisoners there were worked and starved to death within a year. But Krupa managed again to escape, and in the chaos following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union made one of the most extraordinary journeys of the war - from Siberia to safety in Afghanistan. Krupa's Jesuit training had given him an inner strength and resilience which enabled him to survive in the face of appalling brutality and cruelty. Luck and the kindness of strangers helped him complete his epic journey to freedom.

Narrating the Future in Siberia

Author: Olga Ulturgasheva
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857457667
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 211

Book Description
The wider cultural universe of contemporary Eveny is a specific and revealing subset of post-Soviet society. From an anthropological perspective, the author seeks to reveal not only the Eveny cultural universe but also the universe of the children and adolescents within this universe. The first full-length ethnographic study among the adolescence of Siberian indigenous peoples, it presents the young people's narratives about their own future and shows how they form constructs of time, space, agency and personhood through the process of growing up and experiencing their social world. The study brings a new perspective to the anthropology of childhood and uncovers a quite unexpected dynamic in narrating and foreshadowing the future while relating it to cultural patterns of prediction and fulfillment in nomadic cosmology. Olga Ulturgasheva is Research Fellow in Social Anthropology at the Scott Polar Research Institute and Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. She has carried out fieldwork for a decade in Siberia on childhood, youth, religion, reindeer herding and hunting and coedited Animism in Rainforest and Tundra: Personhood, Animals, Plants and Things in Contemporary Amazonia and Siberia (Berghahn Books 2012).

Suddenly, a Criminal: Sixteen Years in Siberia

Author: Melanija Vanaga
Publisher: FriesenPress
ISBN: 1460264037
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 582

Book Description
"Those among us who survived," says Melanija, "did so because we were unbelievably full of the determination and will to live, and faith in our ultimate liberation, as well as because all the disasters arose unexpectedly." From her own and some of her fellow victims' notes and diaries written while the experiences were raw, she portrays an authentic panorama of what ethnic cleansing looked like on the ground during her involuntary Siberian exile (1941-1956). First on an animal collecting station near Tyukhtet when her son Alnis is only nine, and later in the village itself, she and the other women endure homelessness, borderline starvation, extreme cold, humiliation, insult, ill treatment and brutality, and all the while without any knowledge about their husbands' fate, the men having been separated from the women and children already at the first train station where their ordeal began. Add to that, black mud into which one sinks up to the knees, and in Melanija's case, a death's door operation. Miraculously, some survived, and a few, like Alnis, even ultimately regained a respected position in society. Indomitable, iron lady Melanija recorded uncounted biographies of those who did not—members of her extended family, neighbours, friends and acquaintances. She filled one hundred and ten large albums in her calligraphic handwriting, supplemented by photographs, and hand drawn maps and pictures. In Latvia, this documentary became an instant modern classic. In September 2014 it was published in Russian.

Memories of the Russian Court

Author: Anna Viroubova
Publisher: Read Books Ltd
ISBN: 1528766768
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
Anna Alexandrovna Vyrubova (1884 – 1964) was a Russian lady-in-waiting and close friend of Tsaritsa Alexandra Fyodorovna, Empress of Russia and wife of the last ruler of the Russian Empire, Nicholas II. Within this fascinating volume, she recounts her unique experiences of life at the Russian court and relationship with the Romanov family during the years leading up to the 1917 revolution. Offering extraordinary insights into the Romanovs and the political and social climate of the time, this volume constitutes a must-read for anyone with an interest in this significant episode of world history. Many vintage book such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern edition complete with the original text and artwork.

The Island that Dared

Author: Dervla Murphy
Publisher: Eland Publishing
ISBN: 9781906011468
Category : Cuba
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Follows a family holiday in Cuba, on a fully-fledged quest to understand the unique society created by the Cuban Revolution.

The Lost Pianos of Siberia

Author: Sophy Roberts
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802149308
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 443

Book Description
This “melodious” mix of music, history, and travelogue “reveals a story inextricably linked to the drama of Russia itself . . . These pages sing like a symphony.” —The Wall Street Journal Siberia’s story is traditionally one of exiles, penal colonies, and unmarked graves. Yet there is another tale to tell. Dotted throughout this remote land are pianos—grand instruments created during the boom years of the nineteenth century, as well as humble Soviet-made uprights that found their way into equally modest homes. They tell the story of how, ever since entering Russian culture under the westernizing influence of Catherine the Great, piano music has run through the country like blood. How these pianos traveled into this snowbound wilderness in the first place is testament to noble acts of fortitude by governors, adventurers, and exiles. Siberian pianos have accomplished extraordinary feats, from the instrument that Maria Volkonsky, wife of an exiled Decembrist revolutionary, used to spread music east of the Urals, to those that brought reprieve to the Soviet Gulag. That these instruments might still exist in such a hostile landscape is remarkable. That they are still capable of making music in far-flung villages is nothing less than a miracle. The Lost Pianos of Siberia follows Roberts on a three-year adventure as she tracks a number of instruments to find one whose history is definitively Siberian. Her journey reveals a desolate land inhabited by wild tigers and deeply shaped by its dark history, yet one that is also profoundly beautiful—and peppered with pianos. “An elegant and nuanced journey through literature, through history, through music, murder and incarceration and revolution, through snow and ice and remoteness, to discover the human face of Siberia. I loved this book.” —Paul Theroux