Books

The manual contains materials from the course the authors have been reading for a number of years to students at the Faculty of Political Science, Lomonosov Moscow State University. It considers the theoretical underpinnings of the psychological analysis of political mass communication, provides examples from modern communicative political practice and presents texts for reading and assignments for students’ independent work.
For specialists in the field of political science and psychology, students and post-graduate students studying political communication as well as all those who are interested in this subject matter.

The present monograph publishes the works by psychologists from Moscow University, the institution that has accumulated considerable material in the field of sports psychology, including both theoretical fi ndings and their practical application. “Sports Psychology” is a result of long-term work carried out by many researches. The book reflects recent tendencies as well as modern methods applied in the field of sports psychology. It presents the results of experimental studies carried out at Moscow University.

The book will be of interest not only to scientists and specialists in this field, but also to a wider audience interested in modern trends in sports psychology.

The book of selected works by P. Ya. Galperin is the most complete collection of his publications and speeches covering a wide range of fundamental and applied problems of psychology. The publication introduces the teaching of P. Ya. Galperin about orientation activity as a function of the psyche, ideas about its development in philo-, anthropo- and ontogenesis, the theory of gradual formation of mental actions and concepts, the concept of different types of orientation activity.

Of particular interest is the planned-stage formation as a method of studying mental processes, creative thinking and the problem of the relationship between learning and development.

The poetic collection ‘Bird Alphabet’ will help the younger generation to get to know the world of wildlife and will teach them how to love, understand and protect it.

The book ‘Vasily Terkin’ by A. Tvardovsky played an outstanding role during the Great Patriotic War and became, to put it in the words of a front-line soldier, an encyclopedia of the soldier's life which found place for humor that brightened up the endless trench warfare, and the harshest truth, ‘no matter how bitter it was.’ The long-time researcher of the great Russian poet’s life and work tells the story behind this ‘Book about a Soldier’, its complex fate and amazing artistic originality that is still to be fully appreciated.
For teachers of secondary and higher schools, their students, applicants and all lovers of Russian literature.

The book is dedicated to the ‘The Tale of Igor's Campaign’, one of the most famous and mysterious Russian literary monuments. Having been published in 1800 only once according to the manuscript that later burnt in the Moscow fire of 1812, ‘The Tale ...’ has constantly attracted the attention of researchers and writers and generated new interpretations for more than two centuries now. The manual examines the authenticity of the ancient Russian ‘poem’, the creation of a twelfth-century nameless scribe or an eighteenth-century mystification, and the problem of the genre nature of the work, the reflection of history in ‘The Tale ...’, obscure (‘dark’) passages and Christian elements in its text. The book is largely an overview of various modern scholarly interpretations of the monument.
For teachers of schools, lyceums and gymnasiums, students, high school students, applicants, philologists and a wide range of readers.

This original study of A.P. Chekhov's comedy ‘The Cherry Orchard’ is based on a detailed examination of exclusively primary sources — Chekhov's correspondence, memoirs and testimonies of his family and friends, a narrow and confidential social circle. In his first part - ‘The Cherry Orchard’ - ‘Anton Chekhov's Dreams’ - the author attempts to trace the accumulation of creative material, to substantiate and understand the primary sources from which the author derived his idea of writing the play, to analyze the most important circumstances of the writer's life that impacted his creative process. The second part - ‘The Cherry Orchard’ - ‘Mystification of Life’ – is in fact a scientific study of the play itself. The author presents and proves a number of hypotheses and psychological motives for the behavior of the play’s main characters, offers an original explanation of the factual aspect of the play, draws up complete and at times paradoxical psychological portraits of his characters. The third part of the book - ‘The Undisclosed Secrets of the Cherry Orchard’ (The Talk that Never Happened’ - gives the reader an opportunity to fantasize about the play and to reflect on the motives and circumstances that are not subject to scientific discussion and are merely the author’s assumptions and hypotheses.
For teachers and students of secondary and higher schools, applicants and everyone who wants to broaden their understanding of Chekhov's art outside the standard interpretation of this author that has been elaborated in the scientific and journalistic literature.

Unlike other books in this series, this book is a guidebook not just to a single work, but to all of Mayakovsky's lyrics, practically his poetry, for Mayakovsky remained a lyrist in both his civil verses and even in his big poems. Throughout the book, the author guides the reader through a complex labyrinth of bonds that Mayakovsky's lyrical poetry forms with that of his fellow poets, as well as with that of poets who seem to be worlds apart but in fact not so far away.
For teachers of schools, lyceums and gymnasiums, students, high school students, applicants, philologists and a wide range of readers.

This book is the first one to analyze all of A.А. Fet’s lyrical poems which are included in the Education Standard for secondary schools and in the sysllabus for MSU applicants: ‘The cat is singing, his eyes screwed up ...’, ‘As a wavy cloud ...’, ‘Whispers, timid breathing ...’, ‘This morning, this joy ...’, ‘The night was shining, Moonlight had filled the garden...’ and others. Each of the 14 chapters offers a review of one of these poems. The author analyses the motive organization, figurative structure, vocabulary, features of their sound patterns, metrics and rhythms of Fet’s texts.
For teachers of schools, gymnasiums and lyceums, high school students, university entrants, students and teachers of philology and all admirers of Russian literary classics.

The manual offers a systemic chapter-by-chapter analysis of the novel’s text, explains words and names that have fallen out of use, interprets the author's position, characteristics of his narration and style and compares the first and second volumes of the novel. He also references the works that Nikolay Gogol was working on while writing his ‘Dead Souls’ - ‘Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends’ and ‘The Author's Confession’.

For teachers of schools, gymnasiums and lyceums, high school students, university entrants, students, university and college teachers and all admirers of Russian literary classics.

The commentary on the tragedy is based on the interlinear translation of the variant of the text, which was published in the First Folio (1623). The text of the word-for-word translation is compared with the 20th century Soviet translations, which were marked by censorship and aesthetic restrictions so inherent in Soviet literary criticism. The guidebook aims to bring the reader closer to the understanding of Shakespeare's phraseology, the idioms and jokes of his comic characters that live in Verona but speak the language of Elizabethan London.

Andrei Platonov’s novella ‘The Pit Foundation’, one of the most unusual events in Russian literature, is almost journalistically saturated with the realities of that time and is a striking documentary source of Russia’s 20th century dramatic history. The guide to ‘The Pit Foundation’ provides an easy-to-understand and fascinating account about the factual underpinnings of this complex allegorical work; the philosophical subtext of the novella, the literary parallels of its plot, composition and main characters.

For teachers of schools, lyceums and gymnasiums; students, high school students, university entrants, specialists in philology and a wide range of readers.

‘Chevengur’ occupies a central place in Andrei Platonov’s work. The guidebook offers an artistic story behind the novel against the backdrop of the 1920s socio-political situation; it provides a complete philological analysis of the work, showing its links with the historical and cultural context (mythological, religious, philosophical, political and scientific reminiscences including those related to the works of 19th and 20th century Russian literature). It examines the linguostylistic features of Platonov’s text – its specific collocational characteristics and connotational nuances.
For teachers, philologists, students, applicants, high school students and a wide range of readers.

According to V.G. Belinsky, ‘Eugene Onegin’ ‘is Pushkin’s most intimate work, the most beloved child of his imagination.’ There have been numerous researchers’ commentaries on Pushkin's novel in verse. The author of this book takes into account literary scholars’ commentaries and interpretations. At the same time, the reader will find here a lot of new material that has escaped the attention of its previous researchers. The ‘slow reading’ method allows the reader to get rather extensive ideas about the genre of Pushkin’s novel in verse, the nature of its main characters and their relationship with each other. In elucidating the text of ‘Eugene Onegin’ the author successfully brings Pushkin's speech closer to the modern idiom without leaving any of the novel’s realities unexplained. To facilitate the reader's understanding of the Pushkin novel in verse, the book contains a glossary of mythological and art historian terms used in ‘Eugene Onegin.’

For school and university teachers, their students, applicants and all lovers of Russian literature.

‘The Brothers Karamazov’ is the last of the great novels by F.M. Dostoevsky, in which he put everything all he knew and understood about Russia, the world at large, the man and mankind. Externally, this novel is written in a very simple way but it contains numerous profound truths, philosophical meanings, paradoxes and prophecies. The author of the ‘Guide’ identifies and explains many of them and helps the reader see them too by navigating him through the pages of the novel and rereading them again. First, he follows its events and main characters, revealing its explicit and implicit biblical and literary quotations, philosophical and historical allusions, showing the historical context in which the novel was created, and what the writer prophesied about the future. Finally, in his other chapters, the author invites the reader to reflect together with him on the novel’s cross-cutting themes and key scenes.

For high school students and college students, teachers of schools and universities and, in general, fans of this great Russian classic.

By proving that in Russia existed a language situation characterized by the presence of two opposing normed language phenomena from the time of the origin of writing and up until the modern time, Professor M. M. Remneva traces the history of the evolution of the Russian (East Slavonic, Old Russian) literary language based on the material of four hundred 11th-17th century monuments and analyzes its grammatical system in comparison with the language system that was reflected in the Old Church Slavonic texts.

For teachers, graduate students, students and all those who are interested in the history of the language.

A top economist weighs in on one of the most urgent questions of our times: What is the source of inequality and what is the remedy?

In Giving Kids a Fair Chance, Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman argues that the accident of birth is the greatest source of inequality in America today. Children born into disadvantage are, by the time they start kindergarten, already at risk of dropping out of school, teen pregnancy, crime, and a lifetime of low-wage work. This is bad for all those born into disadvantage and bad for American society.

Current social and education policies directed toward children focus on improving cognition, yet success in life requires more than smarts. Heckman calls for a refocus of social policy toward early childhood interventions designed to enhance both cognitive abilities and such non-cognitive skills as confidence and perseverance. This new focus on preschool intervention would emphasize improving the early environments of disadvantaged children and increasing the quality of parenting while respecting the primacy of the family and America's cultural diversity.

Heckman shows that acting early has much greater positive economic and social impact than later interventions — which range from reduced pupil-teacher ratios to adult literacy programs to expenditures on police — that draw the most attention in the public policy debate. At a time when state and local budgets for early interventions are being cut, Heckman issues an urgent call for action and offers some practical steps for how to design and pay for new programs.

The debate that follows delves deeply into some of the most fraught questions of our time: the sources of inequality, the role of schools in solving social problems, and how to invest public resources most effectively. Mike Rose, Geoffrey Canada, Charles Murray, Carol Dweck, Annette Lareau, and other prominent experts participate.