Affiliate (novel)
''Affiliate'' (''Notes of a Radio Presenter'') () is a novel by the Russian writer Sergei Dovlatov. It was written in November 1987 in New York.Сергей ДовлатовСобрание сочинений в 3-х томах. Том 3./ref> Plot introduction The story is set in New York City in the 1980s, and then moves to Los Angeles. It is told in the first person by a man called Dalmatov, seemingly loosely based on Dovlatov himself: he is an immigrant from Russia, and an unsuccessful writer, working for the American-based Russian-language press. Dalmatov presents a programme in Russian on the radio, and is sent to Los Angeles to report on a conference of Soviet dissidents. When he arrives, he bumps into his first love, Tasya, and the memories of their courtship when they both lived in the Soviet Union come flooding back. Analysis The story is told in episodic form, in a style reminiscent of aphorism An aphorism (from Greek ἀφορισμός: ''aphorismos'', denotin ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Novel
A novel is an extended work of narrative fiction usually written in prose and published as a book. The word derives from the for 'new', 'news', or 'short story (of something new)', itself from the , a singular noun use of the neuter plural of ''novellus'', diminutive of ''novus'', meaning 'new'. According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, Medieval Chivalric romance, and the tradition of the Italian Renaissance novella.Margaret Anne Doody''The True Story of the Novel'' New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996, rept. 1997, p. 1. Retrieved 25 April 2014. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, in the historical romances of Walter Scott and the Gothic novel. Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, and John Cowper Powys, preferred the term ''romance''. Such romances should not be con ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Sergei Dovlatov
Sergei Donatovich Dovlatov (; 1941 1990) was a Soviet journalist and writer. Internationally, he is one of the most popular Russian writers of the late 20th century. Biography Dovlatov was born on 3 September 1941 in Ufa, the capital of Bashkir ASSR in the Soviet Union, where his family had been evacuated in the beginning of World War II from Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) and lived with a collaborator of The People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) for three years. His mother, Nora Sergeevna Dovlatova, was Armenian, and his father, , was Jewish and a theater director. Nora originally worked as an actress, and was a close friend of Nina Cherkasova, wife of actor Nikolay Cherkasov; in 1949, she separated from Donat, and began to work as a proofreader. Sergei would live with her in Leningrad. Dovlatov enrolled in the Finnish Department of Leningrad State University in 1958, but flunked after two and a half years. There, he became acquainted with the Leningrad poets ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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First-person Narrative
A first-person narrative (also known as a first-person perspective, voice, point of view, etc.) is a mode of storytelling in which a storyteller recounts events from that storyteller's own personal point of view, using first-person grammar such as "I", "me", "my", and "myself" (also, in plural form, "we", "us", etc.). It must be narrated by a first-person character, such as a protagonist (or other focal character), re-teller, witness, or peripheral character. Alternatively, in a visual storytelling medium (such as video, television, or film), the first-person perspective is a graphical perspective rendered through a character's visual field, so the camera is "seeing" out of a character's eyes. A classic example of a first-person protagonist narrator is Charlotte Brontë's '' Jane Eyre'' (1847), in which the title character is telling the story in which she herself is also the protagonist: "I could not unlove him now, merely because I found that he had ceased to notice me" ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Soviet Dissidents
Soviet dissidents were people who disagreed with certain features of Soviet ideology or with its entirety and who were willing to speak out against them. The term ''dissident'' was used in the Soviet Union (USSR) in the period from the mid-1960s until the Fall of Communism.Chronicle of Current Events (samizdat) It was used to refer to small groups of intellectuals whose challenges, from modest to radical to the Soviet regime, met protection and encouragement from correspondents, and typically criminal prosecution or other forms of silencing by the authorities. Following the etymology of the term, a dissident is considered to "sit apart" from the regime. As dissenters began self-identifying a ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Aphorism
An aphorism (from Greek ἀφορισμός: ''aphorismos'', denoting 'delimitation', 'distinction', and 'definition') is a concise, terse, laconic, or memorable expression of a general truth or principle. Aphorisms are often handed down by tradition from generation to generation. The concept is generally distinct from those of an adage, brocard, chiasmus, epigram, maxim (legal maxim, legal or maxim (philosophy), philosophical), principle, proverb, and saying; although some of these concepts could be construed as types of aphorism. Often aphorisms are distinguished from other short sayings by the need for interpretation to make sense of them. In ''A Theory of the Aphorism'', Andrew Hui defined an aphorism as "a short saying that requires interpretation". A famous example is: History The word was first used in the ''Aphorisms'' of Hippocrates, a long series of propositions concerning the symptoms and diagnosis of disease and the art of healing and medicine. The often-c ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Flashback (narrative)
A flashback, more formally known as analepsis, is an interjected scene (fiction), scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point in the Plot (narrative), story. Flashbacks are often used to recount events that happened before the story's primary sequence of events to fill in crucial backstory. In the opposite direction, a flashforward (or prolepsis) reveals events that will occur in the future. Both flashback and flashforward are used to cohere a story, develop a character, or add structure to the narrative. In literature, internal analepsis is a flashback to an earlier point in the narrative; external analepsis is a flashback to a time before the narrative started. In film, flashbacks depict the subjective experience of a character by showing a memory of a previous event and they are often used to "resolve an enigma". Flashbacks are important in film noir and melodrama films. In films and television, several camera techniques, editing approaches and special e ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Absurdism
Absurdism is the philosophical theory that the universe is irrationality, irrational and meaningless. It states that trying to find meaning leads people into conflict with a seemingly meaningless world. This conflict can be between Rationality, rational humanity and an irrational universe, between intention and outcome, or between subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective assessment and objective worth, but the precise definition of the term is disputed. Absurdism claims that, due to one or more of these conflicts, existence ''as a whole'' is absurdity#The Absurd, absurd. It differs in this regard from the less global thesis that some ''particular'' situations, persons, or phases in life are absurd. Various components of the absurd are discussed in the academic literature, and different theorists frequently concentrate their definition and research on different components. On the practical level, the conflict underlying the absurd is characterized by the individual' ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Zvezda (magazine)
''Zvezda'' () is a Russian literary magazine published in Saint Petersburg since 1924. It began as a bimonthly, but has been monthly since 1927. History The first issue of ''Zvezda'' appeared in January 1924, with Ivan Maisky as editor-in-chief. Katerina Clark writes, in a discussion of the new journals founded at this time: Unlike Moscow, Petrograd was given only one "thick" journal, the ''Star'' (Zvezda), which was less important and had a smaller circulation than its Moscow counterparts, which were thus able to lure away the more successful or acceptable Petrograd writers.... [Zvezda] functioned as a medium through which fringe figures on the left (proletarian extremists) and the right (such as Pilnyak, Boris Pasternak, Pasternak, and Osip Mandelstam, Mandelshtam) could publish. While this situation afforded Petrograd the role of the more honorable, less compromised city, to some it seemed the town of the has-beens.Katerina Clark, ''Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revoluti ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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1990 Russian Novels
Year 199 ( CXCIX) was a common year starting on Monday of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was sometimes known as year 952 ''Ab urbe condita''. The denomination 199 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for naming years. Events By place Roman Empire * Mesopotamia is partitioned into two Roman provinces divided by the Euphrates, Mesopotamia and Osroene. * Emperor Septimius Severus lays siege to the city-state Hatra in Central-Mesopotamia, but fails to capture the city despite breaching the walls. * Two new legions, I Parthica and III Parthica, are formed as a permanent garrison. China * Battle of Yijing: Chinese warlord Yuan Shao defeats Gongsun Zan. Korea * Geodeung succeeds Suro of Geumgwan Gaya, as king of the Korean kingdom of Gaya (traditional date). By topic Religion * Pope Zephyrinus succeeds Pope Victor I, as the 15th pope. Births Valerian Roman ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |