…From Ancient Jerusalem to a Russian sea resort, from a royal palace to a traveling circus by way of a bullfight . Join the Russian writer, pilot and explorer Alexander Kuprin on a fascinating journey to a multitude of places in space and time. This collection includes the following works: - The Garnet Bracelet - Sapsan - The Star of Solomon - The Blue Star - Crimson Blood - Ju-Ju - Sulamyth - The Daughter of the Great Barnum

As I make my way through various on-line and brick-and-mortar book stores, I am increasingly convinced that Russian literature is woefully under-represented. One can always find War and Peace or Crime and Punishment, but to think that is all there is to it?! In all fairness, it would take a separate store chain or a huge server bank to accommodate all the works that would provide a reasonably comprehensive picture of Russian literature. However, I can't help feeling disheartened when seeing, how much precious shelf space is dedicated to the mediocre romance novels and how little - to the works by Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev and Fyodor Tyutchev, to say nothing of Nikolai Gogol, Sergei Yesenin, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetayeva, Igor Severyanin, Alexander Blok, Alexei Tolstoy (yes, there was more than one famous Tolstoy in Russian literature) and many others. There is an entire population of poems and stories you have in all likelihood never met.

Herlihy examines the prevalance of alcohol in Russian social, economic, religious & political life. She looks at how the state, church, military, doctors & the czar tried to battle the problem of over-consumption of alcohol in the imperial period.

The questing, experimenting, and overstepping of stylistic, moral, and narrowly rational boundaries that characterized Russian modernist writing were frowned upon during most of the seven decades of Soviet rule. Only since the late 1980s have readers had easy access to the literature, memoirs, and critical writings of the immediately pre-Soviet period.