{"title":"Vladislav Zhukov","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"old-hunting-grounds-and-other-stories-by-yuri-kazakov-book-vladislav-zhukov-9780987463708","title":"Old Hunting Grounds and Other Stories by Yuri Kazakov","description":"In this second volume Kazakov presents more of his engaging character-cameos and North Russian scenic compositions. His pristine settings are once again living presences described with the touch of a 'psychologist of nature', to quote one of his admirers, the poet Andrei Voznesensky. This was a region whose inhabitants as late as the second half of the 20th century were still largely unaffected by the complexities of modernity, folk for whom the great world was the primordial one of their surroundings: an immediately-sensed universe extending from the near, and at first glance ordinary, outwards to the heavens of the northern lights and the very stars. It is or was until recently still possible beside such places as the White Sea and its adjacent forests and tundra to daily observe country people living in that sort of integration with nature, accepting without question the ocean, the land, and the seasons as the determining power in their lives, and be hardly aware of any other; it was certainly possible a generation ago in Kazakov's time, even in a nation which for years had been frenetically industrialising and whose relation with its environment was relentlessly exploitative. But in the cities as well, including that modernising hothouse which was the Soviet Union's Moscow, some sense of that unity with nature still lingers in these stories, and not merely because references to climate are inescapable in Russian writing. Kazakov saw no opposition between urbanised, technologically evolving humans and the rest of the universe that we call 'natural'. An intercity bus or elektrichka or silver-bellied aeroplane was to him as remarkable, but not more so, as any outgrowths produced by other organisms or by inorganic matter. If his tales of hunting on land and whaling in arctic waters predominate, if they have defined his milieu and established his reputation, it was because to his retrospective imagination those were in his time, and perhaps still are in ours, clear if departing instances of that integration, that give-and-take in nature, that sharing in an immemorial cycle of life and of death that itself sustains life again in its turn.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49605643075857,"sku":"GOR010660510","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51010814411025,"sku":"NIN9780987463708","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0987463705.jpg?v=1750748869"},{"product_id":"old-hunting-grounds-and-other-stories-book-vladislav-zhukov-9781087111353","title":"Old Hunting Grounds and Other Stories","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51018778312977,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51018781163793,"sku":"NIN9781087111353","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1087111358.jpg?v=1751400186"},{"product_id":"old-hunting-grounds-and-other-stories-book-vladislav-zhukov-9781087103488","title":"Old Hunting Grounds and Other Stories","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51018991632657,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51018994024721,"sku":"NIN9781087103488","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1087103487.jpg?v=1750984542"},{"product_id":"old-hunting-grounds-and-other-stories-by-yuri-kazakov-book-vladislav-zhukov-9780987463715","title":"Old Hunting Grounds and Other Stories by Yuri Kazakov","description":"In this second volume Kazakov presents more of his engaging character-cameos and North Russian scenic compositions. His pristine settings are once again living presences described with the touch of a 'psychologist of nature', to quote one of his admirers, the poet Andrei Voznesensky. This was a region whose inhabitants as late as the second half of the 20th century were still largely unaffected by the complexities of modernity, folk for whom the great world was the primordial one of their surroundings: an immediately-sensed universe extending from the near, and at first glance ordinary, outwards to the heavens of the northern lights and the very stars. It is or was until recently still possible beside such places as the White Sea and its adjacent forests and tundra to daily observe country people living in that sort of integration with nature, accepting without question the ocean, the land, and the seasons as the determining power in their lives, and be hardly aware of any other; it was certainly possible a generation ago in Kazakov's time, even in a nation which for years had been frenetically industrialising and whose relation with its environment was relentlessly exploitative. But in the cities as well, including that modernising hothouse which was the Soviet Union's Moscow, some sense of that unity with nature still lingers in these stories, and not merely because references to climate are inescapable in Russian writing. Kazakov saw no opposition between urbanised, technologically evolving humans and the rest of the universe that we call 'natural'. An intercity bus or elektrichka or silver-bellied aeroplane was to him as remarkable, but not more so, as any outgrowths produced by other organisms or by inorganic matter. If his tales of hunting on land and whaling in arctic waters predominate, if they have defined his milieu and established his reputation, it was because to his retrospective imagination those were in his time, and perhaps still are in ours, clear if departing instances of that integration, that give-and-take in nature, that sharing in an immemorial cycle of life and of death that itself sustains life again in its turn.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52740827119889,"sku":"NIN9780987463715","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780987463715.jpg?v=1763485098"},{"product_id":"gentry-book-vladislav-zhukov-9780987463722","title":"Gentry","description":"From their origin in paddy mud during the final decades of the Dutch East Indies, to unimagined roles within the new structures of a modernising Indonesia, 'Gentry' is the saga of an extended Javanese family heroically pursuing its dream of betterment through a social leap. There was in that era at the start of this story a unique route by which an exceptionally determined peasant might attain the status of a 'priyayi'--a class of functionary gentry with a government salary, bureaucratic aristocrats with duties divorced from manual labour, bearers of noble principles of responsibility, figures infinitely esteemed by the illiterate masses below them. That road was education. In 1920s Java, as little as five years of primary schooling--when obtainable--could make the difference. Sastrodarsono's epic begins in the dearth and misery fixed in the race-memory of his forebears, and too in an awareness of where history is tending. The good will of a local priyayi administrator gains for the young man sufficient schooling to qualify him for a position as a humble village-teacher. He has 'mastered the sciences', in the view of the astonished countryside from which he derives. Out of him will spring and extend a clan of such gentry; his children, who will now be born priyayi, shall go on to greater achievements, higher levels of education and prestige, to further consolidate their gentility. And as they do--and Umar Kayam movingly and with wry humour describes the parade of those generations progressing in joy and in sorrow to further their founder's grand ideal--suddenly the immemorial stability of the Indies is riven by war, invasion, a liberation struggle, rebellion and coup, and by the stresses consequent on an awakening country confronting modernity. Ultimately, 'Darsono's striving addresses to the reader and to all social humanity an inevitable question: have we any choice as human beings but to evolve and endeavour? Kayam answers it as creditably as anyone can: one must go on, whatever the difficulties surrounding life; go on and take as many others as possible forward with oneself, in the spirit of duty to family, to nation, and to the human race. The simple ambitions of a Javanese peasant are in this book transformed into a philosophical quest with universal relevance.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52740827742481,"sku":"NIN9780987463722","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780987463722.jpg?v=1763485101"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-vladislav-zhukov.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}