The readers who will benefit most from this book are those who love Pale Fire and are very familiar with it. The study is so good and so thorough, I worry about it spoiling the act of discovery in newcomers to the novel. I read Pale Fire only once before reading Boyd's study. Oddly enough, it almost made me ashamed because I DIDN'T follow my curiousity and see where the clues could lead me. Granted, I don't think I could have reached Browning from the "Papa pisses" reference in Pale Fire, but many other clues could have yielding satisfying discoveries.

Basically, I read Pale Fire as a "Level 1" reader: getting the jokes and appreciating the more obvious ironies about Charles Kinbote. But in this book, Boyd shows how Nabokov's novel can be seen as a super-complex, but coherent pattern of signs, signs blinking at us from the beyond.

I won't spoil any more for those readers who want to discover more about Pale Fire on their own. My only advise is to follow your curiousity!

Nabokov was a writer who celebrated the complexities in life. He looked for unexpected meanings in even the most banal details of existence and the test questions he set for his students were notoriously eccentric, e.g., Describe Madame Bovary's hairdo; What sort of paper covered the walls of Anna Karenina's bedroom? for Nabokov, God was a subtle being, but tremendously inventive and perhaps a little sly.

Nabokov believed that "the unraveling of a riddle is the purest and most basic act of the human mind." He probably would have loved this remarkable book, an attempt to unravel the riddles and hidden meanings Nabokov, himself, embedded in Pale Fire.

When Pale Fire first appeared in 1962, reviewers said, correctly, that it could be enjoyed without puzzling over its hidden meanings but that it obviously hid many levels of complexity. In a now-famous article, Mary McCarthy called Pale Fire "a jack-in-the-box, a Fabergé gem, a clockwork toy, a chess problem, an infernal machine, a trap to catch reviewers..." But she also thought it was a thing of perfect beauty, symmetry, strangeness, originality and moral truth.

Even on a first reading of Pale Fire, we understand that Nabokov is playing a most elaborate literary game. Kinbote is hilariously mad, and his efforts to interpret Shade's poem as a commentary on Zemblan events can be seen as a satire of imaginative academics.

But Nabokov also scattered less obvious clues throughout the book. McCarthy decided that the "real" author of the commentary was yet another Zemblan who is barely mentioned, V. Botkin. And there are those who believe that Nabokov is telling us that John Shade didn't die but simply wrote the commentary under the name of Kinbote as a way of disappearing.

Boyd now interprets Nabokov's intentions in yet another way. He believes that both the poem and the commentary were inspired from beyond the grave as well as by Shakespeare's many ghosts.

Nabokov's Pale Fire is a monument to a brilliant scholar's persistent love affair with a book and its author. For more than three decades now, Boyd has made Pale Fire, and Nabokov, his obsession, much in the way that Nabokov, himself, was obsessed with butterflies. In 1990 and 1991, Boyd published his excellent two-volume biography of Nabokov and established himself as the world's premier Nabokovian.

Pale Fire, however, remained central to this thinking. When Boyd was asked to discuss Pale Fire on the Electronic Nabokov Discussion Forum, he discovered that his own views about this remarkable and original book were changing. Those views form the heart and soul of his own vibrant and energetic work. Even if we do not agree with all of his theories (and anything, at this point, must remain only a theory) we have to admire his scrupulous intelligence and dedication.

Boyd does not disdain eccentric flights of imagination. Nor is he afraid of being thought of as obsessive. There was a sweet madness in Nabokov, and quite obviously, Boyd has assimilated some of it, all to the good.

Nabokov's Pale Fire is more than a wonderful book; it is also a labor of love of the highest order. It can only enhance your understanding and love of both Nabokov and Pale Fire, and perhaps give you some insight into Boyd, himself.

I consider myself fairly well read when it comes to the Soviet military, but right from the first few pages I discovered that my "knowledge" of Soviet women combatants was based on typical Western misconceptions. It was neither the shortage of manpower or the desire to make a propaganda statement that brought Soviet women into combat roles. Instead, it was their sheer determination to take part in the defense of the Motherland and the consistent proving of their combat mettle that accounts for women being welcomed (despite considerable skepticism) into the ranks of the Red Army.

Most of the women whose stories were selected for inclusion in this book are recipients of the coveted Hero of the Soviet Union (HSU) award. This prestigious list includes women from all combat services, but the majority are either Red Air Force pilots or participants in the Soviet resistance.

Almost all Soviet women pilots seemed to have been inspired by a trio of female aviation pioneers named Valentina Grizodubova, Polina Osipenko and Marina Raskova. These three women became as famous in the Soviet Union during the 1930's as Amelia Erhardt was in the West. Grizodubova went on to command a regiment consisting of all men, the only instance of this ever happening, while Raskova formed the first women's regiments and commanded one of them until her death in January of 1943 (Osipenko died in a plane crash before the war). In what seems very unusual to an American reader, bomber/ground attack pilots received much more recognition than fighter pilots. In fact, the only Soviet woman fighter pilot to be named as a Hero of the Soviet Union was Lidya Litvyak, who was awarded the honor posthumously in 1990, nearly 50 years after having been killed in action in August of 1943.

Whenever I was reading through the bios of the women of the Red Army and Air Force, I was glad to learn that many of these heroines lived long and healthy lives after the war and that a good number of them were still alive as of the late 1990s. Then I got to the stories of Soviet Resistance fighters... In their cases, the survivors can be counted on one hand. All the previous stories had been of women who risked their lives fighting the Nazis; all the following were about women who almost invariably sacrificed theirs for the same cause. Some died under torture by the Nazis or their collaborators while others fought to the last bullet against suicidal odds. Very, very few lived to see the invader driven out of their homeland. In many ways, their stories are the most profound.

Two other groups of Soviet women combatants were also included. The first were recipients of the Order of Glory, 1st Class. This award was reserved exclusively for privates, NCOs, and (in the case of the air force) junior lieutenants. It was actually awarded far less often than the Hero of the Soviet Union medal. Only four women received this very rare award for frontline service.

The stories of four female veterans of the Russian Civil War (1918-22) finish up the book. This conflict, not widely written about in the West, is of particular interest to me. I especially enjoyed the bio of "Zemlyachka." Her name appeared briefly in other accounts I had read as someone particularly feared and detested by the counter-revolutionary "White" armies. It was good to finally read a more favorable account of her wartime service. 20 years before Hitler's invasion, "Zemlyachka" and the other three Bolshevik fighters whose stories are told here took part in an epic struggle against a homegrown Russian fascist movement whose victory would have dramatically altered the course of all that was to follow.

Professor Cottam has written a great book that will interest readers of both Soviet and military history as well as those seeking a historical perspective on the current debate regarding women in combat. She has also put together three other books containing both first- and third-person accounts of Soviet women in wartime. If you have even a slight interest in the subject, _Women in War and Resistance_ is a must.

The origin, motivations, role and eventual fate of these women were mixed. Some piloted PO-2 biplanes on night bombing strikes (something I wouldn't wish for my worst enemy), and some flew deadly Yak-1 in bitter dog-fighting. Some drove T-34 battle tanks built with their own money, and some, in the role of snipers, killed scores of enemy officers with frightening efficiency. Many did medical duties, often being killed while protecting their wounded comrades. And many more fought the obscure, hard and ambiguous battles of partisan warfare and underground resistance, often paying with torture and death their choice. Also, if many of the women portrayed in this collection were perfectly integrated in the Soviet system, many others where considered "unreliable" by the Communists authorities, and where awarded only decades after the end of the war, if not when the Soviet State collapsed. And also, if some survived war's hazards died of old age or is still living in post-Soviet Russia, many of them died during the war or - because of wartime toils - just afterwards.

It's difficult, if not impossible to find a common denominator for the characters included in Cottam's volume. While it's evident that a lot of these women joined the fight out of the desire to help their country, others found this as a way toward independence, emancipation and adventure. Prof. Cottam thesis is that - contrarily to the common view held in the West - their chance to see the frontline wasn't part of a organic Communist view of the women's role in the Army. Instead, military resistance to the "acquisition" of female personnel for combat duty was often overcome by personal lobbying to the higher authorities, and a skilful mix of stubbornness, determination and pre-war technical skills (many pilots belonged to air club, and many of the snipers had a past on sport or hunting). It must be noted also that women's presence in the Red Army declined markedly after V-E Day. While all this is probably true, it true also that the Soviet system made much of women's presence in the military machine, and the same presence couldn't have been possible without the presence of a political system bent (at least in theory) on giving social equity. The same Prof. Cottam admit that the Soviet women soldiers experience didn't came simply out of the desperate need for relatively skilled personnel to be thrown into the battlefield meat grinder (or worse, as some latter day bigot insinuates, because of the need for female companionship in the barracks). On the contrary, it can be seen as a real movement generating into different strata of the Russian society, partly because of the war conditions, but also because the terrain was fertile for such experiment. And the high percentage of decorated women, their often-extraordinary deeds, and the fact that many of the decorations came posthumously, testifies to the contribution they did to the war effort.

This is a book that deserves to be read and discussed, not least because of Prof. Cottam skill, authority and method. It could have been easy for her to trivialise, simplify or sentimentalise the matter just make it appetising to a wider audience. In an age of pseudo histo-journalism mainly based on recycled secondary sources, she worked for years on the real thing - archival documents or stories published contemporarily to the facts. "Women in War and Resistance" is the welcome product of this effort.

I was attracted to this title because of my interest in the Russo-German war. I wanted to read about the contributions of women and was wary of the usual Soviet ballyhoo about their valorous decorated women and how the Soviet system inspired and rewarded their dedication. True, many of the women described in these pages were dedicated, as was inevitable under the Hammer and Sickle (and in the face of German brutality). However this book makes clear that their impressive and tragic sacrifices were on behalf their families and to prove their value to their homeland. They were dedicated professionals, not crusaders.

I was not disappointed. A fascinating, relatively unknown and important story, well told. I commend Dr. Cottam for presenting this excellent cross-section of Russian women at war.

The Circassians historically spread across the N. W. Caucasus, speaking a language that was closely related to, but mutually unintelligible with, Ubykh and Abkhaz(-Abaza). The Ubykhs lived compactly around today's Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi, whilst to their south(-east) lay the ancestral homeland of the Abkhazians. Though contacts existed with the Graeco-Roman world and then with Genoese traders a millennium later, it was not really until an expansive Tsarist Russia started to vie with Turkey for control of the region from the late 18th century that Circassia again impinged on the European conscience. A number of moving accounts have been left by such British visitors as James Bell, John Longworth and Edmund Spencer, which contributed to heightened awareness of the noble Circassian-Ubykh-Abkhazian resistance to the Russian aggressor and sympathy for their cause amongst many in Britain and Europe during the 1830s -- just as the parallel battle for freedom led by Shamil in the N. E. Caucasus excited great admiration. But the inevitable happened in 1864 when the N. W. Caucasian alliance was finally defeated and Russia took control. Most of the surviving Circassians and Abkhazians together with ALL the Ubykhs chose to leave their territories and take refuge in Ottoman lands (mainly Turkey). Ubykh died out in 1992, and the future for Circassian and Abkhaz amongst the diaspora is bleak -- in many ways the future of these two languages even in the Caucasian homeland is far from secure.

Amjad Jaimoukha comes from a Kabardian (East Circassian) family in Jordan and has done his people great service in producing this volume. The main deficiency is the absence of any description of the Circassian language, which, to confess a long-held personal belief, I find to be the most beautiful sounding language I have ever heard, and whose loss would be a tragedy not only for the Circassians as an ethno-linguistic group but also for the world of language-study. One or two other points could be made, as indeed I have in a fuller review for the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, but for the purposes of comment here I hope that the book is successful and enjoyed by all its readers.

Excellent Source of information!

The only caveat is that if you're really into the mathematical and graphical side of economics -- this puppy ain't for you. If you look at the overload of math that Krugman's International Economics textbook gives you, this pales in comparison. I wish it had more of that, if only so that on those nights I can't sleep, I have one more resource to use. But that's what I have my girlfriend's stories for.

Anyway, go buy it. It's good.

There comes a point where a student does not want to wade through 4 different textbooks trying to find a specific point of grammar. This book has everything an intermediate to advanced Russian speaker needs. Points are explained clearly and concisely, and almost every aspect of Russian grammar is in here. The only draw back is the numbering system used for finding specific points. The contents do not list thing by page number, rather by sub-sections within a chapter. This can get a bit frustrating, but is extremely minor compared to the overall utility.

In Chekhov's stories, marriage is hardly a bed of roses, usually resulting in discontentment, depression, and adultery; nowhere is this more perfectly executed than in "The Lady with the Dog," which ends with the two transgressors not contrite over their sins, but resolving to carry on their affair in the face of uncertainty. In "The Party," a young married couple's disharmony culminates in a tragedy that underscores their need to love each other. Chekhov's characters tend to marry for the wrong reasons, like societal pressure, false hopes of marital bliss ("The Helpmate," "Betrothed"), and convenience and mutual benefit ("Anna on the Neck"). His characters usually are people who mean well but do the wrong things: In "At a Country House," a cultural elitist has a habit of scaring off the very men he wants his daughters to marry.

Chekhov also touches on themes of pure, often unrequited, love. "The Beauties" is a plaintive tale of infatuation, of a boy's enthralling first discovery of intangible feminine beauty. His lonely characters, such as in "The Schoolmistress," "A Doctor's Visit," and "The Darling," are often prisoners of their own inhibitions, obsessions, and self-obligations.

Other topics are covered, often exhibiting a world-weary cynicism. In the amusing fable "The Shoemaker and the Devil," the protagonist's conclusion is not the cliched lesson to be thankful for the few things he has in life, but rather that there is nothing in life worth selling his soul to the devil for. "Rothschild's Fiddle" is like a Marc Chagall painting set to prose, portraying the futility and bitterness of life offset by the beauty of art, while "Whitebrow" is a fuzzy parable. Chekhov also displays a talent for drawing comical characters, such as the talkative blowhard in "The Petchenyeg" and the prudish protagonist of "The Man in a Case." A mark of Chekhov's style is that these people often are oblivious to their own idiosyncrasies, a touch that injects as much comedy as tragedy into the stories.

These stories might leave one with the impression that Chekhov was pessimistic about love and marriage, and even life, but in my opinion they emphasize a fundamental truism about fiction -- much as in comedy, where failure is funnier than success, even though "good" love is what makes the world go around, "bad" love is more interesting to write about.

Chekhov is a master, but I almost wish he'd never existed. His prose is so deceptively simple that it will make everyone reading him, be they caterers, kids, or Senate whips, think "I can do that!" Needless to say, they can't.

This doesn't mean anyone will ever stop trying. Chekhov fans the flames of megalomania in what Sartre called the "Sunday writer", dilettantes like Mathieu in The Age of Reason. Almost every short story written now is in either the style of Raymond Carver or Chekhov, and Carver was just the first to graft Chekhov's style onto American subjects. What is that style? It's not as instantly recognizable as Kafka's or Joyce's -- two terminal figures who can't be imitated -- but if you want an example of it, grab any New Yorker that might be lying around the house and flip to the short story. Got one? Okay, now notice how it doesn't end with a swordfight or an orgy. Instead, it will most likely hinge on a simple misunderstanding, such as a man making an offhand comment that causes his wife to lose all respect for him, or else some kind of sudden revelation; like an interior monologue where, after seeing two schoolgirls share a bologna sandwich, a professional woman realizes her entire life is corrupt and shallow. Shocks of recognition, mundane realism, and a muted climax ( this last is especially crucial; the professional woman above wouldn't throw off her worldly chattels and move to India, but would simply go back to her office, maybe even with a little excitement to get to work on a new ad campaign ) -- these are the hallmarks of Chekhovian writing.

The bad news is that we can look forward to an eternity of these pale imitations. Because the times are always changing, Chekhov's journalistic style -- remember he started out as a newspaperman -- ALWAYS APPLIES. It's a nightmare. But that's no reason to keep you, as it kept me for so long, from the original. All of Chekhov's best stories are here, or in the other two volumes of the Modern Library series ( where the nitpicker below can find the other stories whose absence he laments, except "Gusev," which is in this one. )

Of course, Suvorov had great material to begin with, having gone through the Soviet army, Spetznaz and the GRU. The book was bound to be good because of that alone, even if he hadn't written it with such obvious passion. But he has; one of the greatest strengths of the book is that he has managed to capture the feeling of all the institutions and the whole situation so overwhelmingly well. Another is definitely the facts themselves - they are just interesting, not to mention important enough for this book to be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the history of the XXth century.

I feel this book is among the best (if not THE best) written on this subject, but the greatest thing about it is something quite simple - you needn't be interested in history to like it. You will anyway.

I would also recomend another book by the same author - "The Liberators" - describing in more detail his career in the soviet military before he joined the GRU.

Previous volumes in the series are: Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849; Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859; Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865; and Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871.

It was during the final decade of his life, 1871-1881, that Dostoevsky wrote Diary of a Writer and his greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov. Many pages of Frank's fifth volume deals with analzying these two works (140 pages for The Brothers Karamazov alone).

With impressive literary scholarship, Frank throws light on the historical, political, economic, social, cultural, and literary setting within which Dostoevsky created his works of art, novels of great psychological depth.

For example, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: "Dostoevsky, the only psychologist, by the way, from whom I had anything to learn; he is one of the happiest accidents of my life, even more so than my discovery of Stendhal."

Dostoevsky traced the roots of the evils in Russian society to a loss of religious faith. By "religious faith" he meant specifically the Christian faith of the Russian Orthodox Church. He thought the Roman Catholic Church was a distortion and perversion of true Christianity. (See the harangue Dostoevsky puts into the mouth of Prince Myshkin in Part Four, Chapter VII, of The Idiot.

Of particular interest is Frank's discussion of Dostoevsky's philosophical thinking (framed, of course, within a Christian worldview), such as his ruminations on Russian nationalism, rational egoism, and the freedom of the will, and his grave concerns over the adverse moral and political effects of atheism and nihilism.

Frank soft-pedals Dostoevsky's notorious anti-Semitism, seeking to exonerate his hero as being simply "a child of his time."

Although one finds many things to dislike about Dostoevsky, one cannot help being impressed by his literary genius. Recognizing the excellence of Dostoevsky's art, Frank devotes the lion's share of his volume not to the man himself but to the man's literary production.

While this is surely not the fault of Joseph Frank, one is depressed by the seemingly endless fare of Russian sectarian bickering and murky political maneuverings. One breathes a huge sigh of relief to escape this oppressive atmosphere.