The Career of a Tsarist Officer was first published in 1975. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
General Anton I. Denikin served as an officer in the Russian army throughout a notable career until 1920 when, as commander in chief of the White Russian armies, he was forced to flee from Bolshevik forces at Novorossiisk. In these memoirs, which cover his childhood, youth, and military service up to 1916, we have an unusually candid autobiography and one which illuminates some little-known aspects of Russian social as well as military history.
General Denikin was born in 1872 in the Warsaw province of Russian Poland. He was a graduate of the prestigious General Staff Academy in St. Petersburg, and during his years at the academy he launched a literary career which continued for the rest of his life, enabling him to support his family in their later exile.
Distinguished service in the Russo-Japanese War earned his promotion to colonel in the army, and from that time in 1905 to his tragic fate in 1920 when he left Russia never to return, he served his country with a deep and abiding loyalty, matched only by his devotion to the Orthodox religion. After living in exile in several European countries, principally in France, he moved in 1945 to the United States, where he died in 1947.
The present volume is a translation from the Russian-language edition which was published in 1953 by the Chekhov Publishing house in New York. In this, General Denikin's last work, he provides the social and intellectual background for an understanding of the traits of the Russian officer corps which enabled them to continue the fight for a unified, non-Bolshevik Russia even after the tsar was dead and the cause obviously lost. Through Denikin's eyes one sees also a revealing picture of the efforts of Russo-Japanese War participants to renovate the Russian army in the interwar period, their recognition of the growing threat from Germany as well as from the revolutionaries, and the futility they felt as they entered prematurely into World War I.
Winner of the 2021 Found in Translation Award
First published in Polish in 1932, The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma was Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz’s breakout novel. Dyzma is an unemployed clerk who crashes a swanky party, where he makes an offhand crass remark that sets him on a new course. Soon high society—from government ministers to drug-fueled aristocrats—wants a piece of him. As Dyzma’s status grows, his vulgarity is interpreted as authenticity and strength. He is unable to comprehend complicated political matters, but his cryptic responses are celebrated as wise introspection. His willingness to do anything to hold on to power—flip-flopping on political positions, inventing xenophobic plots, even having enemies assaulted—only leads to greater success.
Dołęga-Mostowicz wrote his novel in a newly independent Poland rampant with political corruption and populist pandering. Jerzy Kosinski borrowed heavily from the novel when he wrote Being There, and readers of both books will recognize similarities between their plots. This biting political satire—by turns hilarious and disturbing, contemptuous and sympathetic—is an indictment of a system in which money and connections matter above all else, bluster and ignorance are valorized, and a deeply incompetent man rises to the highest spheres of government.
The wrenching decision facing successful women choosing between demanding careers and intensive family lives has been the subject of many articles and books, most of which propose strategies for resolving the dilemma. Competing Devotions focuses on broader social and cultural forces that create women's identities and shape their understanding of what makes life worth living.
Mary Blair-Loy examines the career paths of women financial executives who have tried various approaches to balancing career and family. The professional level these women have attained requires a huge commitment of time, energy, and emotion that seems natural to employers and clients, who assume that a career deserves single-minded allegiance. Meanwhile, these women must confront the cultural model of family that defines marriage and motherhood as a woman's primary vocation. This ideal promises women creativity, intimacy, and financial stability in caring for a family. It defines children as fragile and assumes that men lack the selflessness and patience that children's primary caregivers need. This ideal is taken for granted in much of contemporary society.
The power of these assumptions is enormous but not absolute. Competing Devotions identifies women executives who try to reshape these ideas. These mavericks, who face great resistance but are aided by new ideological and material resources that come with historical change, may eventually redefine both the nuclear family and the capitalist firm in ways that reduce work-family conflict.
This study of the sometimes stormy career of a brilliant and colorful talmudist offers a broad picture of medieval Hispano-Jewish culture.
Meir Abulafia (ca. 1165-1244), commonly called Ramah, was born into the old Jewish aristocracy of Muslim Spain and educated in the best Judeo-Arabic tradition, but lived his whole life under the new political and cultural realities of Christian Spain. Mr. Septimus portrays Ramah's career as a lawyer, exegete, poet, and theologian in an age of rapid cultural change. His book describes the intellectual cross-fertilization and conflict that resulted from new connections with European Jewish communities to the north. It focuses, in particular, on the great controversy over the philosophical rationalism of Maimonides, which Ramah initiated and in which he played a major role. This clash dominated Jewish intellectual history for three centuries and parallels important developments in Latin Christendom.
In Rewrite Man, Alison Macor tells an engrossing story about the challenges faced by a top screenwriter at the crossroads of mixed and conflicting agendas in Hollywood. Whether writing love scenes for Tom Cruise on the set of Top Gun, running lines with Michael Keaton on Beetlejuice, or crafting Nietzschean dialogue for Jack Nicholson on Batman, Warren Skaaren collaborated with many of New Hollywood’s most powerful stars, producers, and directors. By the time of his premature death in 1990, Skaaren was one of Hollywood’s highest-paid writers, although he rarely left Austin, where he lived and worked. Yet he had to battle for shared screenwriting credit on these films, and his struggles yield a new understanding of the secretive screen credit arbitration process—a process that has only become more intense, more litigious, and more public for screenwriters and their union, the Writers Guild of America, since Skaaren’s time. His story, told through a wealth of archival material, illuminates crucial issues of film authorship that have seldom been explored.
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