A Russian Journal, John Steinbeck
A Russian Journal, John Steinbeck
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A Russian Journal

Author: John Steinbeck

Narrator: Richard Poe

Unabridged: 7 hr 1 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 11/13/2014


Synopsis

Steinbeck and Capa’s account of their journey through Cold War Russia is a classic piece of reportage and travel writing.Just after the Iron Curtain fell on Eastern Europe, Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Steinbeck and acclaimed war photographer Robert Capa ventured into the Soviet Union to report for the New York Herald Tribune. This rare opportunity took the famous travelers not only to Moscow and Stalingrad – now Volgograd – but through the countryside of the Ukraine and the Caucasus. Hailed by the New York Times as "superb" when it first appeared in 1948, A Russian Journal is the distillation of their journey and remains a remarkable memoir and unique historical document.What they saw and movingly recorded in words and on film was what Steinbeck called "the great other side there … the private life of the Russian people." Unlike other Western reporting about Russia at the time, A Russian Journal is free of ideological obsessions. Rather, Steinbeck and Capa recorded the grim realities of factory workers, government clerks, and peasants, as they emerged from the rubble of World War II—represented here in Capa’s stirring photographs alongside Steinbeck’s masterful prose. Through it all, we are given intimate glimpses of two artists at the height of their powers, answering their need to document human struggle. This edition features an introduction by Steinbeck scholar Susan Shillinglaw.

About The Author

John Steinbeck, born in Salinas, California, in 1902, grew up in a fertile agricultural valley, about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast. Both the valley and the coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929). After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two California books, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories later collected in The Long Valley (1938). Popular success and financial security came only with Tortilla Flat (1935), stories about Monterey’s paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the California laboring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the book considered by many his finest, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The Grapes of Wrath won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1939.Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with The Forgotten Village (1941) and a serious student of marine biology with Sea of Cortez (1941). He devoted his services to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial play-novelette The Moon is Down (1942). Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward Bus (1948), another experimental drama, Burning Bright (1950), and The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951) preceded publication of the monumental East of Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family’s history. The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he traveled widely. Later books include Sweet Thursday (1954), The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957), Once There Was a War (1958), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), America and Americans (1966), and the posthumously published Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969), Viva Zapata! (1975), The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976), and Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (1989). Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, and, in 1964, he was presented with the United States Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Steinbeck died in New York in 1968. Today, more than thirty years after his death, he remains one of America's greatest writers and cultural figures.Susan Shillinglaw is director of the Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Banu on June 23, 2024

steinbeck’in “rusya günlüğü” müthiş bir kitap. 2. dünya savaşının hemen sonrası, 1947’de, steinbeck ve fotoğrafçı arkadaşı robert capa, uzun izin süreçlerinin ardından rusya’ya gidiyorlar. amaç politik değil, kim bu insanlar, ne yer ne içerler, aşık olurlar mı, dans ederler mi, canavarlar mı… sorula......more

Goodreads review by Steven R. on January 09, 2018

Steinbeck met photographer Robert Capa and together they decided to take a trip to the Soviet Union. They sought to discover the people of the Soviet Union not in the way that the popular, prejudiced, propaganda-heavy media had done and were doing (this was right at the cusp of the Cold War), but th......more

Goodreads review by Benjamin on April 20, 2012

Two things: a) I wish Penguin would've gotten hold of some more hi-res versions of Capa's photos. You can find some of them at Magnum's online collection, and they're much better quality than the images in the book. b) I wish Steinbeck had published an addendum to this journal after Khrushchev's Secre......more

Goodreads review by Paolo on January 01, 2021

Ultimissima lettura del 2020 ed in un certo senso emblematica e salutifera. John Steinbeck e Robert Capa si recano per un reportage nella Russia dell'immediato dopoguerra (siamo nel 1947). Per una fortunata combinazione non vengono considerati cronisti, ma incaricati di uno "scambio culturale" e così......more


Quotes

By the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature