Stephen Lovell Livres

The Soviet Union at its height occupied one sixth of the world's land mass, encompassed fifteen republics, and stretched across eleven different time zones. More than twice the size of the United States, it was the great threat of the Cold War until it suddenly collapsed in 1991. Now, almost twenty years after the dissolution of this vast empire, what are we to make of its existence? Was it a heroic experiment, an unmitigated disaster, or a viable if flawed response to the modern world? Taking a fresh approach to the study of the Soviet Union, this Very Short Introduction blends political history with an investigation into Soviet society and culture from 1917 to 1991. Stephen Lovell examines aspects of patriotism, political violence, poverty, and ideology, and provides answers to some of the big questions about the Soviet experience. Throughout, the book takes a refreshing thematic approach to the history of the Soviet Union and it provides an up-to-date consideration of theSoviet Union's impact and what we have learnt since its end.About the Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.

"German-Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-75) fled from the Nazis to New York in 1941, and during the next thirty years in America she wrote her best-known and most influential works, such as The Human Condition, The Origins of Totalitarianism, and On Revolution. Yet, despite the fact that a substantial portion of her oeuvre was written in America, not Europe, no one has directly considered the influence of America on her thought--until now. In Arendt and America, historian Richard H. King argues that while all of Arendt's work was haunted by her experience of totalitarianism, it was only in her adopted homeland that she was able to formulate the idea of the modern republic as an alternative to totalitarian rule. Situating Arendt within the context of U.S. intellectual, political, and social history, King reveals how Arendt developed a fascination with the political thought of the Founding Fathers. King also re-creates her intellectual exchanges with American friends and colleagues, such as Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy, and shows how her lively correspondence with sociologist David Riesman helped her understand modern American culture and society. In the last section of Arendt and America, King sets out the context in which the Eichmann controversy took place and follows the debate about 'the banality of evil' that has continued ever since..."--Amazon.com

This volume brings together scholars from Britain, Germany and Russia to investigate the unprecedented boom in commercial popular literature that has occurred in post-Soviet Russia. From the early 1990s onwards, Russian readers began to rediscover genres of mass fiction that in Soviet times had been either taboo or under a dark cloud. Book publishing became a true 'business', and all genres of literature were fair game for the emerging literary entrepreneurs. Western thrillers and romantic novels were widely translated, but 'native' authors were soon trying their hand at these new forms - some of them with great commercial success. Russia was assimilating foreign cultural models with extraordinary rapidity, but at the same time giving them a new and distinctive flavour. „Reading for Entertainment in Contemporary Russia“ is the first full attempt to describe and analyse this remarkable three-way encounter between Russian and Soviet cultural traditions, Western genre patterns, and post-Soviet social and economic realities. It offers rich material for scholars and students in literary and cultural studies as well as for all readers with an interest in contemporary Russian culture and society.