Samson the Nazarene. Five
6.99 €
Out of stock
Samson the Nazarene. Five
6.99 €
Vladimir (Zeev) Jabotinsky (1880–1940) was a Russian and Jewish writer, a brilliant prose writer, subtle poet, caustic publicist, and sensitive translator, one of the central figures of Zionism, and the greatest ideologist of the Jewish state. His literary works were praised by Alexander Kuprin and Maxim Gorky, and he was friends with Korney Chukovsky, who towards the end of his life said of Jabotinsky: “There was something of Pushkin’s Mozart in him, and perhaps even of Pushkin himself... Even his enemies must admit... that he was enormously talented.” This collection includes two of Jabotinsky’s most striking prose texts, the novels Samson of Nazareth (1926) and The Five (1936). The novel Samson of Nazareth is a hymn to the love of freedom, a re-told and life-filled story of a biblical character, an imperfect and invincible hero of the era of the Judges. It would seem that the plot is familiar to everyone (Samson tearing apart the lion's jaws; Samson killing a thousand enemies with a donkey's jawbone; Samson and Delilah; Samson triumphing over the Philistines), but Jabotinsky tells about what remains behind the scenes: about the wisdom and anger that slowly grow from the very human gut, and about the impossibility and inevitability of victory. And in the novel "Five", written based on Jabotinsky's memoirs about Odessa in the early 20th century, the furious roar of history is mixed with quiet nostalgic sadness, the innocent hooliganism of students - with latent brutality and selfless revolutionary fervor, and reckless fun - with stoic doom. Here, the irrepressible love of life and gloomy laughter of Babel's "Odessa Tales" echo, at times, the almost childish pathos of Kataev's "The Lonely Sail Glows White", and sometimes even the elegiac quality of the very distant and yet close Vilno from Alexandra Brushtein's "The Road Goes into the Distance...", but the heroes of "The Five" are no longer children, and therefore, most clearly and furiously, it rings with a premonition of delightful and terrible changes on the brink of the destruction of the world.
See also:
- All books by the publisher
- All books by the author
- All books in the series Azbuka-Classic