I like Robert Payne's translations of Chekhov because he has a good ear for the flow of beautiful writing. He does not bog Chekhov's prose down with needless commas like Constance Garnett and others. Payne's Chekhov reads seamlessly. He understands that good storytelling is about how the words flow together as in speech. Beautiful translations. (By the way, they are perfect for teaching Chekhov to high school or college students.)

Rosa La Luna

I have had the pleasure of visiting the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia. If you ever have the chance to go, I highly recommend it. I spent three wonderful days in the Hermitage and would have been content going back every day for the rest of my vacation. Although some museums surpass the Hermitage in their collections (surprisingly few), none has fewer visitors per masterpiece. It was not unusual to be alone in a room of Van Goghs for 30 minutes at a time. The lightly guarded museum does not even have a security guard in every room. So the experience of the museum is a wonderfully intimate one.

If you never go to St. Petersburg, you must get and read this outstanding work about the French art from 1860 to 1950. Most of these works do not travel very much, so you won't see them otherwise. That would be a terrible shame, because many significant works, especially the Matisses and Gauguins, from this period are in the collection.

How did such a great French art collection find its way to Russia? That's an interesting story, and the book begins with a long essay about that. Although the Czar and the nobility had always collected art, this period of French art was not very appealing to them. A new merchant class had grown up, and they embraced advanced art from France (beyond the salon portraits the nobles commissioned) that became known as Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. After the Communists firmed up their hold on Russia, museums were consolidated and private collections were expropriated. You will enjoy seeing black and white photographs from the many private museums that these business people sponsored. The Shchukin and Morozov collections form an important base for this collection, as well as having provided important support for these French artists before they were well established.

In most art books, not enough of the reproductions are in color. This book is the exception. The reproductions are essentially all in color. There are 433 of them in color. They are also done in large sizes in many cases, which makes it easier to appreciate them.

The Hermitage is particularly rich is works by Matisse and Picasso, and these are presented in depth in this book. You will also find lots of Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, Gauguin, Degas, Van Gogh, Rodin, and Bartholome. Outstanding examples of works by lesser known artists round out the collection in a way that will give you a different sense of the period than you get at the Musee D'Orsay or the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Albert Kostenevich is by far the world's authority on these works, as their primary curator for over 30 years. No one else has had nearly as much access or incentive to study them. He has written several fine, detailed essays that relate the works to each other and explain the works. In fact, this is better than going to the Hermitage because you would not have him at your side to explain things there.

And, naturally, if you have been to the Hermitage, this book makes a fabulous souvenir. Treat yourself today!

After enjoying this wonderful book, ask yourself, what other outstanding art collections have I not yet seen? Even if you cannot visit them, there may well be a book on the collection that you can order from Amazon.com!

Atlanta & Houston will host a travelling selection drawn from the Pushkin's holdings of these wonderful French Impressionists in the Spring & Summer of 2003. Most of these works were "condemned" by the Communists, hidden away for much of the 20th century. The treatment by this author, with many photos of rarely-seen but marvelous art works, is of great interest to Americans. The world owes a debt to the Russian collectors who amassed these works, & the Russian curators who have preserved them for posterity!

This is a fantastically good book, which challenges some conventional misconceptions about both Freudianism and early Soviet communism.

I would have appreciated more material on the attitude of some of the dissident Freudians, like Reich, toward the new Soviet Union. But the emphasis is on the other side of the equation -- the way the Leninists viewed Freudianism, and the psychoanalysts within their own country.

The material is complicated, but Miller makes it as straightforward as humanly possible.

I've taught 3rd to 5th grade classes, and the students always love this book. The story is well told, and the pictures are wonderfully done. I've had to buy it three times now, because students who like it too much keep stealing it! I don't know why this isn't in print anymore; it drives me crazy, trying to find copies of it. Next time I'm going to put it in a safe...

I collect fairy tales and folk tales for their illustration. This is the best book I've found for beautiful, intricate artwork

Mary Halasz is an American woman who has spent the last 63 years in the small western Ukraine city of Uzhhorod. Her Hungarian parents moved with the infant Mary from newly-formed Czechoslovakia to Trenton, New Jersey in 1921. While growing up she visited Uzhhorod with her mother a couple of times. On one of these visits she met her future husband and started a correspondence. She moved to Uzhhorod in 1938 on the eve of World War II to marry the Hungarian man she had fallen in love with. Mary had two children and lived through World War II, the Holocaust, the transfer of Uzhhorod to Soviet Ukraine and her husband's imprisonment in the Siberian Gulags. She is kept apart from her American family by Soviet bureaucracy until her mother is finally allowed to visit in 1962.

The story of her life will give American readers a very accessible point of view on the history and society of the Soviet Union and western Ukraine. Her experiences as a single parent in a small regional capital in the Carpathian Mountains will be of interest to students of women's studies, Soviet history, and Ukrainian life.

My parents are from a small town just outside Uzhhorod and I have visited the city four times. I found her story to reflect the charm and mystery of this remote corner of the world very accurately and completely.

This is a fine book. It shows how the Communist leftist establishment discriminated against Jews, even ones who were not religious and who had a parent in the Communist Party. It also provides the evidence first hand of the network of informers and the regular denunciation of minor deviations from the party line by students at elite universities. It also shows how jobs were just for time serving and provides the raw material to infer that the foundation of Soviet economic growth up to the 1960's had been the ruthless exploitation of slave labourers. Whilst Gurevich did things that under Stalin would have spelt death, he was still punished for them, but not as severely, ultimately having to break with his parents, his wife and his child. This was repression, but with a softer profile. It also shows the great courage of Jewish organizations in fabricating "family re-union" invitations to allow people to go free. Moreover, it also shows that the food shortages and the gangs were in place well before 1991 and President Yeltsin. It is a powerful and important book.

This book is an excellent introduction to what happened from the Lenin to Stalin years in the USSR. Anyone who's curious how a country meant to turn into a Socialist Democracy became a Totalitarian Tyranny will want to read this book! This book enlightens the reader on how that country was corrupted by Stalin, and it also attacks some of the myths spread about the Bolsheviks which are still propagated today ( the German gold idea, for instance ). For those who think that Stalinism is the natural outcome of Bolshevism, read this book; It dispels the myth. This book should be complemented later by books by Trotsky and Isaac Deutscher's biographical trilogy about Lenin's second-in-command as well, but all in all, a great book to start with for understanding the Russian Revolution.

This is an entrancing account of how real Russians overcome the exigencies of daily life in present-day Russia. The author, a fluent Russian-speaker, lived for a year as just another teacher at a Moscow secondary school. Unlike other writers (cf Colin Thubron) where a travel writer or journalist bases an account an accoun on interviews, often conducted through an interpreter, Dora O'brien participated fully and was invited to share her colleagues' lives as one of them. Structured around the powerful effects of the seasons, the book provides real insights into the ups and downs of ordinary people's lives. The book is un-put-downable.