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Full-text articles to support research in history and genealogy and lesson plans to support student learning.
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Crowell critical library volume 0
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English
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Notes from Underground also translated as Notes from the Underground or Letters from the Underworld) is a novella by Fyodor Dostoevsky, first published in the journal Epoch in 1864. It is a first-person narrative in the form of a "confession": the work was originally announced by Dostoevsky in Epoch under the title "A Confession".
The novella presents itself as an excerpt from the memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred...
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Dostoevsky's most revolutionary novel, Notes from Underground marks the dividing line between nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, and between the visions of self each century embodied. One of the most remarkable characters in literature, the unnamed narrator is a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence. In full retreat from society, he scrawls a passionate, obsessive, self-contradictory narrative that serves...
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Crown's game volume 2
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English
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Russia is on the brink of great change. Pasha's coronation approaches, and Vika is now the Imperial Enchanter, but the role she once coveted may be more difficult--and dangerous--than she ever expected. Pasha is grappling with his own problems--his legitimacy is in doubt, the girl he loves loathes him, and he believes his best friend is dead. When a challenger to the throne emerges--and with the magic in Russia growing rapidly--Pasha must do whatever...
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Thelate 1800s find fourteen-year-old Batya in the Russian countryside, fleeing with her family endless pogroms. Desperate, her father leaps at the opportunity to marry Batya to a worldly, wealthy stranger who can guarantee his daughter an easy life and passage to America. Feeling like a princess in a fairytale, Batya leaves her old life behind as she is whisked away to a new world. But soon she discovers that she's entered a waking nightmare. Her...
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Set in London and Russia at the turn of the century, Susana Aikin's debut introduces a vibrant young woman determined to defy convention and shape an extraordinary future.
Like other well-bred young women in Edwardian England, Lily Throop is expected to think of little beyond marriage and motherhood. Passionate about the stage, Lily has very different ambitions. To her father's dismay, she secures an apprenticeship at London's famous Imperial Theatre....
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Katerina trilogy volume 1
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English
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In St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1888, royal debutante Katerina Alexandrovna, Duchess of Oldenburg, tries to hide a dark secret--that she has the ability to raise the dead--but when she uses her special skill to protect a member of the Imperial Family, she finds herself caught in a web of intrigue.
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A trio of semi-autobiographical novels, “Childhood”, “Boyhood”, and “Youth” portray a rich landowner's son and his growing realization of the gulf between himself and his family's peasants. Tolstoy's childlike perspective, leavened with adult understanding, weaves a universal tale of the emotions, confusions, and fears of a young boy as he begins to understand his place in society and his growing awareness of the world around him.
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From the author of The Heart’s Invisible Furies and The Absolutist, a propulsive novel of the Russian Revolution and the fate of the Romanov family.
Part love story, part historical epic, part tragedy, The House of Special Purpose illuminates an empire at the end of its reign. Eighty-year-old Georgy Jachmenev is haunted by his past—a past of death, suffering, and scandal that...
Part love story, part historical epic, part tragedy, The House of Special Purpose illuminates an empire at the end of its reign. Eighty-year-old Georgy Jachmenev is haunted by his past—a past of death, suffering, and scandal that...
14) The idiot
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Twenty-six-year-old Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin returns to Russia after spending several years at a Swiss sanatorium. Scorned by the society of St. Petersburgh for his idiocy, generosity and innocence, he finds himself at the centre of a struggle between a beautiful kept woman and a gorgeous, virtuous girl, both of whom win his affection. Unfortunately, Myshkin's very goodness seems to precipitate disaster, leaving the impression that, in a world...
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"An enthralling, picaresque tale of two Jewish sisters in late nineteenth-century Russia, filled with "boundless imagination, wit, and panache" (David Grossman), and enough intrigue and misadventure to stupefy the Cohen brothers. With her reputation as a vilde chaya, a wild beast, Fanny Keismann isn't like the other women in her shtetl-certainly not her obedient and anxiety-ridden sister, Mende, whose "philosopher" of a husband, Zvi-Meir, has run...
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From Tolstoy to Lenin, from Diaghilev to Stalin, The Empire Must Die is a tragedy of operatic proportions with a cast of characters that ranges from the exotic to utterly villainous, the glamorous to the depraved. In 1912, Russia experienced a flowering of liberalism and tolerance that placed it at the forefront of the modern world: women were fighting for the right to vote in the elections for the newly empowered parliament, Russian art and culture...
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Russia, 1891. The new governor-general of Siberia has been secreted away on a train from St. Petersburg to Moscow. A blizzard rages outside as a mustachioed official climbs aboard near the city; with his trademark stutter, he introduces himself as State Counsellor Erast Fandorin. He then thrusts a dagger inscribed with the initials CG into the governor-general's heart and, tearing off his mustache, escapes out the carriage window. The head of the...
18) The adolescent
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The narrator and protagonist of Dostoevsky's novel The Adolescent" "(first published in English as A Raw Youth) is Arkady Dolgoruky, a naive 19-year-old boy bursting with ambition and opinions. The illegitimate son of a dissipated landowner, he is torn between his desire to expose his father's wrongdoing and the desire to win his love. He travels to St. Petersburg to confront the father he barely knows, inspired by an inchoate dream of communion and...
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"In 1917, Alma Pihl, a master craftsman in the House of Fabergé, was charged to protect one of the greatest secrets in Russian history--an unknown Fabergé Egg that Peter Karl Fabergé secretly created to honor his divided allegiance to both the people of Russia and the Imperial tsar's family. When Alma and her husband escaped Russia for their native Finland in 1921, she took the secret with her, guarding her past connection to the Romanov family....
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"After the final curtain of Swan Lake, an animated crowd exits the Mariinsky theatre brimming with excitement from the night's performance. But outside the scene is somber. A ballerina's body lies face down in the snow, blood splattered like rose petals over the costume of the Swan Queen. The crowd is silenced by a single cry-- "Nemetseva is dead!" Amongst the theatergoers is Lady Emily, accompanying her dashing husband Colin in Russia on assignment...