By the book: reflections on an Indian childhood reading Soviet hardbacks • Hacker News Board

Re: By the book: reflections on an Indian childhood reading Soviet hardbacks

#51

Post by lb1lf » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 6:49 PM UTC

jhbadger wrote: post #36

yantrams wrote: post #33

I can't emphasize enough how important these books were in shaping my childhood in a rural town in India. I still vividly remember making a fuss when Misha and Sputnik stopped after the fall of Soviet. A part of me is forever indebted to Russia for this. Given the strong Communist presence in Andhra Pradesh, the state I am from, we were lucky to have a great number of these books translated to Telugu, by no less than…

Funny thing about the Sputnik magazine. In a lot of the West it was seen as Communist propaganda (which to be fair a lot of it was), but in the late 1980s it was actually banned in East Germany because it wasn't Communist enough as it wrote favorably about Perestroika and Glasnost, which the leaders of the GDR weren't happy about.

According to an ossi friend of mine, the moment he could no longer buy Sputnik, that torch of progressive socialism at his local Leipzig newsstand was the moment he realised that the GDRs days were numbered...

Re: By the book: reflections on an Indian childhood reading Soviet hardbacks

#52

Post by billfruit » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 6:58 PM UTC

pankajk1 wrote: post #50

g4omingron wrote: post #6

No mention of the most famous Russian book among Indian high Schoolers: [Problems in General Physics by I E Irodov]( https://www.amazon.com/Problems-General-Physics-I-Irodov/dp/... )?

There was a Mir Publishers bookshop close to my college in Patna and I would make regular visits in hope of landing gems like IE Irodov. Alas, most other Science books were so so and nowhere near their American counterparts (Halliday Resnick for Physics, Morrison Boyd for Chemistry comes to mind).

The Soviets did have the Landau book for physics, though I do not know if it was made available in India.

I should put a word for an Indian publishing house named Narosa which put out cheap editions of text books(mostly western) like the Feynman Lectures, Fermi's Thermodynamics, etc.

Re: By the book: reflections on an Indian childhood reading Soviet hardbacks

#53

Post by billfruit » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 7:15 PM UTC

yantrams wrote: post #42

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm from Coimbtore, Tamilnadu. Me & my sister loved reading Misha in the early 90's. Some of the stories where deep. Is there an online archive for those magazines? P.S. I'm writing this via kindle & I didn't take any effort to search for it. Edit:typo

Here you go :) https://mirtitles.org/2018/11/11/misha-stack/

I think, what made them special was the very smooth, glossy printing, and extremely vivid colours. If you take american comics of a similar time, eg something like Archies: Archies colours look pale and faded, compared with the bright contrasts and lush colours of the Misha.

Re: By the book: reflections on an Indian childhood reading Soviet hardbacks

#54

Post by selune » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 7:18 PM UTC

alehul wrote: post #24

billfruit wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I think Russian lit is indeed beloved in India, Nabokov is perhaps yet to get his due appreciation, perhaps Solzhenitsyn also.

Nabokov, to be fair, left Russia before the age of 18 and I don't believe he ever returned [1]. Lolita, his magnum opus (at least by public opinion), was first written in English. Despite his upbringing, I'm not sure he would be best classified as Russian Lit. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Nabokov

Nabokov is absolutely considered a Russian writer by Russians themselves, both lit critics and casual readers. He wrote 8 novels in Russian and identified himself as both Russian and American and, according to his own words, loved the Russian language most.

Re: By the book: reflections on an Indian childhood reading Soviet hardbacks

#55

Post by yantrams » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 7:28 PM UTC

billfruit wrote: post #52

pankajk1 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a Mir Publishers bookshop close to my college in Patna and I would make regular visits in hope of landing gems like IE Irodov. Alas, most other Science books were so so and nowhere near their American counterparts (Halliday Resnick for Physics, Morrison Boyd for Chemistry comes to mind).

The Soviets did have the Landau book for physics, though I do not know if it was made available in India. I should put a word for an Indian publishing house named Narosa which put out cheap editions of text books(mostly western) like the Feynman Lectures, Fermi's Thermodynamics, etc.

Landsberg's series on Elementary Physics[0] would be a more appropriate counterpart to Resnick & Halliday etc, targeted towards those preparing for university exams. Narosa has a great collection indeed.

0 - https://archive.org/details/LandsbergElementaryTextbookOnPhy...

Re: By the book: reflections on an Indian childhood reading Soviet hardbacks

#56

Post by selune » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 7:32 PM UTC

Comments in this thread are kind of trippy but also so heartwarming to read. I was born in independent Ukraine but, unsurprisingly, I studied math and physics with the help of all of those Soviet handbooks: Perelman, Irodov etc, basically all of them are household names.

It's amazing to realize that somebody from a totally different culture, continent, language, was slouching over the same problems as I was, maybe even at the same time.

Re: By the book: reflections on an Indian childhood reading Soviet hardbacks

#57

Post by vram22 » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 8:52 PM UTC

billfruit wrote: post #52

pankajk1 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a Mir Publishers bookshop close to my college in Patna and I would make regular visits in hope of landing gems like IE Irodov. Alas, most other Science books were so so and nowhere near their American counterparts (Halliday Resnick for Physics, Morrison Boyd for Chemistry comes to mind).

The Soviets did have the Landau book for physics, though I do not know if it was made available in India. I should put a word for an Indian publishing house named Narosa which put out cheap editions of text books(mostly western) like the Feynman Lectures, Fermi's Thermodynamics, etc.

Yes, I've bought computer books from Narosa and they were good. I think they had tie-ups with western publishing houses like Springer-Verlag, etc.

Re: By the book: reflections on an Indian childhood reading Soviet hardbacks

#58

Post by vram22 » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 8:58 PM UTC

selune wrote: post #56

Comments in this thread are kind of trippy but also so heartwarming to read. I was born in independent Ukraine but, unsurprisingly, I studied math and physics with the help of all of those Soviet handbooks: Perelman, Irodov etc, basically all of them are household names. It's amazing to realize that somebody from a totally different culture, continent, language, was slouching over the same problems as I was, maybe ev…

Good points. I am in India. When in college, used to buy and read those books, for math., physics, etc. Good content. I remember Ya. Perelman's [1] books in particular, for popularizing physics to the layman. Stuff about perpetual motion machines (explaining why they cannot work), physical phenomena related to refraction, reflection, etc., and much else besides.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakov_Perelman

Re: By the book: reflections on an Indian childhood reading Soviet hardbacks

#59

Post by vishnugupta » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 9:01 PM UTC

yantrams wrote: post #40

vishnugupta wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the Kannada translation of the book "Fun with Physics" back when I was in primary school. Didn't understand large parts of it but that didn't stop me from repeatedly reading the books. As high quality as the content was I absolutely loved the high quality print, glossy and gorgeous paper, and really beautiful and durable hard cover. The illustrations were also of high quality. They also had a very distinct sme…

Is this the book you are referring to ? - https://sovietbookbugs.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/rassian-c...

Holy mother!!! Never in my dreams could I imagine I'd be seeing it again. You've made my day :-). And, as you'd know surely, how similar/close Kannada and Telugu scripts are I could effortlessly read it!

It does bring back a flood of memories. Thanks again :-)

Re: By the book: reflections on an Indian childhood reading Soviet hardbacks

#60

Post by ordu » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 10:10 PM UTC

> I wonder who Rabiza was; none of the many fan sites for Soviet books say that.

I've found a short postmortem from 2002 in a magazine "Science and Life"[1]. Seems he was engineer, painter and popular science writer/journalist.

[1] https://www.nkj.ru/archive/articles/4982/