Yuri Slezkine Livres

This masterwork of interpretative history begins with a bold declaration: “The Modern Age is the Jewish Age, and the twentieth century, in particular, is the Jewish Century.” The assertion is, of course, metaphorical. But it drives home Yuri Slezkine’s provocative thesis: Jews have adapted to the modern world so well that they have become models of what it means to be modern. While focusing on the drama of the Russian Jews, including émigrés and their offspring, The Jewish Century is also an incredibly original account of the many faces of modernity—nationalism, socialism, capitalism, and liberalism. Rich in its insight, sweeping in its chronology, and fearless in its analysis, this is a landmark contribution to Jewish, Russian, European, and American history.

The epic story of an enormous Soviet apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction 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 chilling true story of an enormous Moscow apartment building where Soviet leaders and their families lived until hundreds of these Bolshevik true believers were led, one by one, to prison or to their deaths in Stalin's purges. Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews with survivors, and featuring hundreds of rare photographs, this epic story weaves together biography, literary criticism, architectural history, and fascinating new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies, and reigns of terror. The result is an unforgettable saga of a building that, like the Soviet Union itself, became a haunted house, forever disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared.

Arctic Mirrors is a vividly rendered history of circumpolar peoples in the Russian empire and the Russian mind.

The author claims that not only have Jews adapted better than many other groups to living in the modern world, they have become the premiere symbol and standard of modern life everywhere. The Jews traditionally belonged to a social category known as "service nomads," an outsider group specializing in the delivery of goods and services. This role--urban, mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually intricate, physically fastidious, and occupationally flexible--has taken center stage in the modern age. Marxism and Freudianism sprang largely from the Jewish predicament, and both Soviet Bolshevism and American liberalism were affected in fundamental ways by the Jewish exodus from the Pale of Settlement. The book concentrates on the drama of the Russian Jews, including m̌igrš and their offspring in America, Palestine, and the Soviet Union. But Slezkine has as much to say about the many faces of modernity as he does about Jewry.--Publisher

Nowatorska praca znanego amerykańskiego historyka i eseisty poświęcona wyjątkowemu budynkowi w Moskwie, gdzie zamieszkiwali wszyscy prominentni politycy najwyższych władz partii i rządu Związku Sowieckiego. Autor opowiada dzieje komunistycznej władzy w Rosji przez pryzmat losów kolejnych generacji mieszkańców Domu Władzy wybudowanego w centralnym punkcie dzielnicy Błota w Moskwie. Trudno znaleźć lepszą perspektywę do opowiadania o kulisach życia sowieckich ludzi na świeczniku. Rzecz odkrywcza, świetnie napisana, która trafi do kanonów literatury sowietologicznej.