A TLS and Prospect Book of the Year From the New York Times bestselling author of The Romanov Sisters comes the story of the Russian aristocrats, artists, and intellectuals who sought freedom and refuge in the City of Light. Paris has always been a city of cultural excellence, fine wine and food, and the latest fashions. But it has also been a place of refuge for those fleeing persecution — never more so than before and after the Russian Revolution and the fall of the Romanov dynasty. For years, Russian aristocrats had enjoyed all that Belle Epoque Paris had to offer, spending lavishly when they visited. It was a place of artistic experimentation, such as Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. But the brutality of the Bolshevik takeover forced Russians of all types to flee their homeland, sometimes leaving with only the clothes on their backs. Arriving in Paris, former princes could be seen driving taxicabs, while their wives who could sew worked for the fashion houses, their unique Russian style serving as inspiration for designers such as Coco Chanel. Talented intellectuals, artists, poets, philosophers, and writers struggled in exile, eking out a living at menial jobs. Some, like Bunin, Chagall, and Stravinsky, encountered great success in the same Paris that welcomed Americans such as Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Political activists sought to overthrow the Bolshevik regime from afar, while double agents plotted espionage and assassination from both sides. Others became trapped in a cycle of poverty and their all-consuming homesickness for Russia, the homeland they had been forced to abandon.

From Helen Rappaport, the New York Times bestselling author of The Romanov Sisters comes After the Romanovs, the story of the Russian aristocrats, artists, and intellectuals who sought freedom and refuge in the City of Light. Paris has always been a city of cultural excellence, fine wine and food, and the latest fashions. But it has also been a place of refuge for those fleeing persecution, never more so than before and after the Russian Revolution and the fall of the Romanov dynasty. For years, Russian aristocrats had enjoyed all that Belle Époque Paris had to offer, spending lavishly when they visited. It was a place of artistic experimentation, such as Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. But the brutality of the Bolshevik takeover forced Russians of all types to flee their homeland, sometimes leaving with only the clothes on their backs. Arriving in Paris, former princes could be seen driving taxicabs, while their wives who could sew worked for the fashion houses, their unique Russian style serving as inspiration for designers like Coco Chanel. Talented intellectuals, artists, poets, philosophers, and writers struggled in exile, eking out a living at menial jobs. Some, like Bunin, Chagall and Stravinsky, encountered great success in the same Paris that welcomed Americans like Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Political activists sought to overthrow the Bolshevik regime from afar, while double agents from both sides plotted espionage and assassination. Others became trapped in a cycle of poverty and their all-consuming homesickness for Russia, the homeland they had been forced to abandon. This is their story.

First Published in 1998. This volume will surely be regarded as the standard guide to Russian literature for some considerable time to come... It is therefore confidently recommended for addition to reference libraries, be they academic or public.

After Russia is considered the high point in Tsvetaeva's output of shorter poems. Tsvetaeva told Pasternak that all that mattered in the book was its anguish. Technical mastery and experimentation are underpinned by suicidal thoughts, a sense of exclusion from the circle of human love and companionship, and an increasing alienation from life.

Ignored upon its publication in 1926 in a Russian émigré periodical, Marina Tsvetaeva's extraordinary narrative poem The Ratcatcher is today deemed by critics and readers to be the zenith of her impressive oeuvre. Written in Prague and Paris in the mid-1920s and now available in the United States for the first time, The Ratcatcher is at once a paean to literary tradition and a scathing attack on the materialistic, unspiritual lifestyle embraced by post-Bolshevik Russia.

The political changes at the end of the last century in the Soviet Union, and later the Russian Federation, had deep-reaching repercussions on the interpretation of Russian culture in the time of division between “Russia Abroad” and “Russia at Home”. Ever since, scholars have tried to understand and to describe the interrelationship between the two Russias. In spite of intensive research, numerous conferences and publications, there are still many discoveries to be made and a number of questions to be answered. This volume presents a selection of articles based on papers presented at an international conference on Russian émigré culture that was held at Saarland University, Germany, in 2015. The essays assembled here offer new insights into aspects of Russian émigré culture already known to scholarship, but also to explore new facets of it. As such, it is not the well-known centres and leading figures of Russian emigration that are highlighted; instead the authors give prominence to places of seemingly secondary importance such as Prague, Istanbul or India and to such lesser-known aspects as collections and collectors of Russian émigré art and the impact of cultural activities of the Russian emigration on the culture of the respective host countries.