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Crystal World (short Story)
''Crystal World '' (russian: «Хрустальный мир») is a short story by Victor Pelevin, published in 1991. Plot All the events of the story are read in a phantasmagoric way. The story is based on real events, as evidenced by the date put at the beginning of the narrative: October 24, 1917. It was at that time, at night, that the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, overthrowing the Provisional Government. The heroes of the story, Nikolai Muromtsev and Yuri Popovich (persons fictionalized), are sent on night duty to prevent Lenin and his associates from entering Smolny. Attention should be drawn to the names of these cadets, which refer the reader to the epic Russian heroes Ilya Muromets and Alyosha Popovich, who back in the day faithfully defended the borders of the Russian land. Like these bogatyrs, Nikolai and Yuri, although they occasionally snort cocaine, which brings them closer to our contemporaries, who in the 1990s lived in an "inverted consciousness" ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Victor Pelevin
Victor Olegovich Pelevin ( rus, Виктор Олегович Пелевин, p=ˈvʲiktər ɐˈlʲɛɡəvʲɪtɕ pʲɪˈlʲevʲɪn; born 22 November 1962) is a Russian fiction writer. His novels include '' Omon Ra'' (1992), '' The Life of Insects'' (1993), '' Chapayev and Void'' (1996), and ''Generation P'' (1999). He is a laureate of multiple literary awards including the Russian Little Booker Prize (1993) and the Russian National Bestseller (2004), the former for the short story collection ''The Blue Lantern'' (1991). His books are multi-layered postmodernist texts fusing elements of pop culture and esoteric philosophies while carrying conventions of the science fiction genre. Some critics relate his prose to the New Sincerity literary movement. Biography Victor Olegovich Pelevin was born in Moscow on 22 November 1962 to Zinaida Semenovna Efremova, an English teacher, and Oleg Anatolyevich Pelevin, a teacher at the military department of Bauman University. He lived on ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rudolf Steiner
Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner (27 or 25 February 1861 – 30 March 1925) was an Austrian occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published works including '' The Philosophy of Freedom''. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy. Many of his ideas are pseudoscientific. He was also prone to pseudohistory. In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality. His philosophical work of these years, which he termed " spiritual science", sought to apply what he saw as the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions, differentiating this approach from what he considered to be vaguer approaches to mysticism. In a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1991 Short Stories
File:1991 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: Boris Yeltsin, elected as Russia's first president, waves the new flag of Russia after the 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt, orchestrated by Soviet hardliners; Mount Pinatubo erupts in the Philippines, making it the second-largest volcanic eruption of the 20th century; MTS Oceanos sinks off the coast of South Africa, but the crew notoriously abandons the vessel before the passengers are rescued; Dissolution of the Soviet Union: The Soviet flag is lowered from the Kremlin for the last time and replaced with the flag of the Russian Federation; The United States and soon-to-be dissolved Soviet Union sign the START I Treaty; A tropical cyclone strikes Bangladesh, killing nearly 140,000 people; Lauda Air Flight 004 crashes after one of its thrust reversers activates during the flight; A United States-led coalition initiates Operation Desert Storm to remove Iraq and Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, 300x300px, thumb rect 0 0 200 200 1991 S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alexander Blok
Alexander Alexandrovich Blok ( rus, Алекса́ндр Алекса́ндрович Бло́к, p=ɐlʲɪˈksandr ɐlʲɪˈksandrəvʲɪtɕ ˈblok, a=Ru-Alyeksandr Alyeksandrovich Blok.oga; 7 August 1921) was a Russian lyrical poet, writer, publicist, playwright, translator and literary critic. Early life Blok was born in Saint Petersburg, into an intellectual family of Alexander Lvovich Blok and Alexandra Andreevna Beketova. His father was a law professor in Warsaw, and his maternal grandfather, Andrey Beketov, was a famous botanist and the rector of Saint Petersburg State University. After his parents' separation, Blok lived with aristocratic relatives at the manor Shakhmatovo near Moscow, where he discovered the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov, and the verse of then-obscure 19th-century poets, Fyodor Tyutchev and Afanasy Fet. These influences would affect his early publications, later collected in the book ''Ante Lucem''. Career and marriage In 1903 he married the actr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eino Rahja
Eino Abramovich Rahja (20 June 1885 – 26 April 1936) was a Finnish-Russian revolutionary who joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903, becoming aligned with the party's Bolshevik faction. Rahja organized Lenin's temporary escape to Finland in the summer of 1917. During the Finnish Civil War, Rahja was one of the most capable military leaders of the Reds. After the Reds lost the war, he fled to the Russian SFSR where he lived for the rest of his life and became, for example, a commander of the army corps ( komkor) in the Red Army.Jukka Paastela: Finnish Communism under Soviet Totalitarianism (Kikimora 2003). Eino Rahja was expelled from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Finland in 1927. In the early 1920s he was politically close to Grigory Zinoviev. Eino was a brother of Jukka Rahja and Jaakko Rahja. His brother, Jaakko, was wounded during the Kuusinen Club Incident on 31 August 1920. Rahja was expelled from the army in 1935 for his alcoholism ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Communist Party Of Finland
The Communist Party of Finland ( fi, Suomen Kommunistinen Puolue, SKP; sv, Finlands Kommunistiska Parti) was a communist political party in Finland. The SKP was a section of Comintern and illegal in Finland until 1944. The SKP was banned by the state from its founding and did not participate in any elections with its own name. Instead, front organisations were used. In the 1920s the communists took part in the Socialist Workers' Party of Finland (1920–1923) and the Socialist Electoral Organisation of Workers and Smallholders (1924–1930). Both of them were also banned. In 1944, a new front, Finnish People's Democratic League was formed. The SKP controlled these fronts but they always had a prominent minority of non-communist socialists. History Early stages In 1918, the Reds lost the Finnish Civil War. The Social Democratic Party of Finland had supported the losing side, and several of its leaders were exiled in Soviet Russia. Some of these exiles founded the Communis ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bolsheviks
The Bolsheviks (russian: Большевики́, from большинство́ ''bol'shinstvó'', 'majority'),; derived from ''bol'shinstvó'' (большинство́), "majority", literally meaning "one of the majority". also known in English as the Bolshevists,. It signifies both Bolsheviks and adherents of Bolshevik policies. were a far-left, revolutionary Marxist faction founded by Vladimir Lenin that split with the Mensheviks from the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), a revolutionary socialist political party formed in 1898, at its Second Party Congress in 1903. After forming their own party in 1912, the Bolsheviks took power during the October Revolution in the Russian Republic in November 1917, overthrowing the Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky, and became the only ruling party in the subsequent Soviet Russia and later the Soviet Union. They considered themselves the leaders of the revolutionary proletariat of Russia. Their bel ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anthroposophy
Anthroposophy is a spiritualist movement founded in the early 20th century by the esotericist Rudolf Steiner that postulates the existence of an objective, intellectually comprehensible spiritual world, accessible to human experience. Followers of anthroposophy aim to engage in spiritual discovery through a mode of thought independent of sensory experience. While much of anthroposophy is pseudoscientific, proponents claim to present their ideas in a manner that is verifiable by rational discourse and say that they seek precision and clarity comparable to that obtained by scientists investigating the physical world. Anthroposophy has its roots in German idealism, mystical philosophies, and pseudoscience including racist pseudoscience. Steiner chose the term ''anthroposophy'' (from Greek , 'human', and '' sophia'', 'wisdom') to emphasize his philosophy's humanistic orientation. He defined it as "a scientific exploration of the spiritual world", Others have variously called it a "ph ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mysticism
Mysticism is popularly known as becoming one with God or the Absolute, but may refer to any kind of ecstasy or altered state of consciousness which is given a religious or spiritual meaning. It may also refer to the attainment of insight in ultimate or hidden truths, and to human transformation supported by various practices and experiences. The term "mysticism" has Ancient Greek origins with various historically determined meanings. Derived from the Greek word μύω ''múō'', meaning "to close" or "to conceal", mysticism referred to the biblical, liturgical, spiritual, and contemplative dimensions of early and medieval Christianity. During the early modern period, the definition of mysticism grew to include a broad range of beliefs and ideologies related to "extraordinary experiences and states of mind." In modern times, "mysticism" has acquired a limited definition, with broad applications, as meaning the aim at the "union with the Absolute, the Infinite, or God". This l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Religion
Religion is usually defined as a social- cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements; however, there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion. Different religions may or may not contain various elements ranging from the divine, sacred things, faith,Tillich, P. (1957) ''Dynamics of faith''. Harper Perennial; (p. 1). a supernatural being or supernatural beings or "some sort of ultimacy and transcendence that will provide norms and power for the rest of life". Religious practices may include rituals, sermons, commemoration or veneration (of deities or saints), sacrifices, festivals, feasts, trances, initiations, funerary services, matrimonial services, meditation, prayer, music, art, dance, public service, or other aspects of human culture. Re ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Junker (Russia)
Junker (russian: юнкер (''yunker''), has several meanings in Imperial Russia. The Russian substantive ''Yunker'' is derived from the German noun ''Junker'', where it means "young lord". *Yunker (ru: юнкер) was the rank for a volunteer at military service (ru: вольноопределяющийся, ''volnoopredelyayushchiycya'', de: One-year volunteer) in the Imperial Russian Army in 19th and 20th centuries. **Fanen-yunker/yunker (ru: фанен-юнкер/юнкер) was a military rank for junior officers of dvoryan descent since 1902. *Kamer-yunker (ru: камер-юнкер; cf. German ''Kammerjunker'') was a courtier title defined in the Table of Ranks, generally equating to '' valet de chambre'' or Groom of the Chamber. *Yunker was a term for students of any military or junker school in between 1864 and 1917. Junker schools Junker schools in Russia were introduced in 1864. They were usually located next to district headquarters in a given region. Junk ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Phantasmagoria
Phantasmagoria (, also fantasmagorie, fantasmagoria) was a form of horror theatre that (among other techniques) used one or more magic lanterns to project frightening images, such as skeletons, demons, and ghosts, onto walls, smoke, or semi-transparent screens, typically using rear projection to keep the lantern out of sight. Mobile or portable projectors were used, allowing the projected image to move and change size on the screen, and multiple projecting devices allowed for quick switching of different images. In many shows, the use of spooky decoration, total darkness, (auto-)suggestive verbal presentation, and sound effects were also key elements. Some shows added a variety of sensory stimulation, including smells and electric shocks. Such elements as required fasting, fatigue (late shows), and drugs have been mentioned as methods of making sure spectators would be more convinced of what they saw. The shows started under the guise of actual séances in Germany in the late ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
