

28.01.2016
RussianNG Ex Libris — Five Books of the Week
28 January 2016
David Samoilov. Above the Fairground — the Sky. Poetry and Theater / Compiled, with afterword and commentary by G. R. Yevgrafov.
Moscow: Text, 2015. 448 pp. ISBN 978-5-7516-1285-6
Prepared for the 95th anniversary of the poet David Samoilov (1920–1990) by Gennady Yevgrafov, a regular contributor to NG-EL, this collection brings together works connected with the theater. It includes poems, articles, the play A Farce about Klopov, a stage adaptation of Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago, and a translation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or What You Will. According to the publisher’s note, many of these works had never been published before.
Georgy Adamovich. Posledniye Novosti. 1934–1935 / Text prepared, compiled and annotated by O. A. Korostelev.
St. Petersburg: Aletheia, 2015. 608 pp. ISBN 978-5-906823-06-9
For the first time, the publishers say, the literary articles of poet, essayist and critic Georgy Adamovich (1892–1972), printed between 1928 and 1940 in the Russian émigré newspaper Posledniye Novosti in Paris, have been gathered in a single volume. Adamovich writes about Nabokov and Akhmatova, Shmelev and Prishvin, among others. Of Prishvin’s novella Ginseng he says: “For a long time no book so simple, so profound, calm and genuinely poetic has come from Russia.”
Vladimir Gelfand. Diary 1941–1946 / Executive
editor and author of the introduction O. V. Budnitsky; compiled by O.
V. Budnitsky and T. L. Voronina; notes by T. L. Voronina and I. A.
Malakhova.
Moscow: Political Encyclopedia, Knizhniki, 2015. 752 pp. ISBN 978-5-8243-1983-5
A participant in the Great Patriotic War, first a sergeant and later a lieutenant and mortar-platoon commander, Vladimir Gelfand (1923–1983) kept a diary from May 1941 to October 1946 — something remarkable and, in itself, almost unreal. The entries trace his path through the war, including the Battle of Stalingrad and the liberation of Ukraine, Poland and Germany, while recording everyday life at the front and behind the lines and the coming of age of a young idealist.
Kenneth Rexroth. The Signature of All Things / Translated from English, compiled and annotated by Kirill Adibekov.
Moscow: Free Marxist Publishing House, 2015. 184 pp. ISBN 978-5-98063-025-6
Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) was an American poet, artist and activist in the anarchist movement of the 1920s and 1930s. The book consists of three parts; at its center is the postwar collection of the same name, in which the author “thought it interesting to subject… philosophical views to the test of dramatic speech”: “My head and shoulders and my book / In the cool shade, and my body / Stretched out, bathing in the sun, I lie, / Reading, beside the waterfall — / Boehme, The Signature of All Things…”
Douglas Dunlop. The History of the Jewish Khazars. Religion of the Higher Clans / Translated from English by L. A. Igorevsky.
Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2016. 256 pp. ISBN 978-5-9524-5174-2
The author defines his task as “the study of the available material and, as far as possible, a coherent account of the history of the Khazar nation and state” on the basis of traditional sources. He examines the origins of the Khazars, the Arab–Khazar wars, “The Conversion of the Khazars to Judaism According to Arabic Sources” and “The Conversion of the Khazars to Judaism According to Jewish Sources,” as well as other aspects of Khazar history.