The thorny path of beauty.

Classics Press publishes nonfiction and literature in modern, accessible editions at reasonable prices.

The Collection - Seven Classics

The is a new edition of seven classic works of political and military science. Each of the included classical works are available individually as well as together in the collection.

All of these classics are already available in English editions, but nearly always a format that is difficult to read and understand. Most of these are in English translations that are very old, or missed out on the fundamental insights. Many include a lot of excess commentary which is mostly unnecessary and unhelpful.

Our editing process reduces the repetition and unnecessary commentary and cruft, and clarify what is essential and insightful in the works using modern English prose. This process is an abridgement:

[C]ondensing or reduction of a book or other creative work into a shorter form while maintaining the unity of the source.

The goal of this project is to produce a collection of works with clear and modern English that showcases the timeless insights which these classics have within them. We also want to provide several different formats for these works, including:

• Ebook
• Paperback
• Audiobook

The Collection - Individual Titles

This is an international collection, with two books from China, one from India, two from Europe, and two from Japan. The books also span over 2,000 years of history. Some of these books are focused on war and military science (Art of War, Book of Five Rings, Hagakure), others are more self-reflective and develop an ethical philosophy (Analects, Meditations), and others still are focused more on politics and ruling (Arthashastra, The Prince).

Each of these works provides a unique and historical perspective regarding these topics, and they complement each other in tracing deep insight into the nature of leadership, war, and politics.

Affordable Pricing

Classics Press is committed to making classic works more accessible, and that includes reasonable pricing. Individual works are priced at $2.99 ​​USD for ebooks and $7.99 USD for print books (which includes the same work as a free Kindle ebook). The entire collection Seven Classics on War and Politics is priced at $9.99 USD for the ebook and $24.99 USD for the paperback book (which includes a free kindle ebook). The price is inclusive of VAT.

Let the grain remain unmown in the fields!

We are waiting for guests!
Let the overripe ears rot!
They will come to the yellowed fields,
And don’t put up with you, honest and brave,
Your heads!
They will trample the golden fields,
They will dig up a shady cemetery,
Then he will loosen their unclean lips
Bloody hops!
They will burst into the blackened huts,
They will light a fire - intoxicated, brutal...
The old man's white gray hairs will not stop them,
Not a child's cry!
Among the forests, dull and abandoned,
We leave grain in the fields unmown.
We are waiting for uninvited and uninvited guests,
Your children!
1906

The first, not included in the poetry collections during his lifetime (“Stone” opens with the poems “The sound is cautious and dull...”), technically structured, not yet powerful enough in relation to the image, but quite sensitive to impressions beyond the boundaries of the verse, in general, in relation to to these verses you can pronounce all the words that almost always characterize the so-called. early and very early poetic creativity, which ends up on the pages of posthumous publications solely due to strong “philological connections”, from grateful readers-interlocutors and that part of the scientific community that is looking for every breath and every choke of the earthly life of a beloved poet. One way or something like this, one could imagine these poems, the earliest of those currently published in Mandelstam’s collections, and flip the first page to go to the third, but this is Osip Mandelstam, so the poem requires from us, perhaps, a little more careful attention, than the skepticism of meeting the first naive experience, the first publication in an amateur school magazine - they say, this is not Mandelstam yet. It should be noted that, after all, if this is not “already Mandelstam,” then it is still Mandelstam, and without any quotation marks.

There is extremely scant information about this early poem by Mandelstam. It was not included in the first book, and as if outside of literary fate, it is easy to see student and artificial aspects in it, and nevertheless these early poems are quite interesting because the young poet published them in the semi-revolutionary publication of his school, this quite unexpected. And here is information about the poem from the most recent complete blue Collected Op. Osip Mandelstam (1 volume, 2009, p. 669): “Among the forests, dull and abandoned...” - published in “Awakened Thought”, 1907. Vol. 1. Signed “O. M." This and the similar “A Path Stretches Through the Forest” were written under the impression of stories about the reprisal of government troops against rebel peasants in Zegewold (later Sigulda) at the beginning of 1906. Mandelstam lived in Zegewold that year in the summer; these events were also reflected in “The Noise of Time” (chapter “Erfurt Program”). In 1906 or early 1907, Mandelstam, under the influence of fellow student and friend Boris Sinani, joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party, acted as an agitator at meetings, and published in the “opposition” journal of the school, “Awakened Thought” (in issue 58, pp. 31-48).” .

It is probably wrong to talk about these youthful poems of Mandelstam as casually and harshly as G. Ivanov managed in his memoirs, when he qualifies the poems written simultaneously with them “A dusty path stretches through the forest” by Mandelstam as revolutionary, ironically remembering “Warsaw.” (“Stretched by the forest..” - published there, in “Awakened Thought”, the journal of the Tenishev School, St. Petersburg, 1907, issue 1, but under the pseudonym “Wick” (found by G. Superfin and V. Sazhin). Printed by D-88, p. 105 (published by A. Mets). This poem contains the lines “Blue peaks will embrace with pitchforks / And will be stained with blood,” G. Ivanov remembered them in 1911 or 1912 and later quoted them in the article “ Osip Mandelstam”: “Few people know that... Mandelstam composed many “political poems” similar to Yakubovich-Melshin “The blue peaks will embrace the pitchforks and be stained with blood,” he praised the coming revolution. “Varshavyanka” he considered an unsurpassed example. civil lyrics" (New Journal, 1955, No. 43, p. 276).

Georgy Ivanov cannot like the fact that the Mandelstams, during the common youth of their brilliant, without a shadow of a doubt, poetic generation, “succumbed” to revolutionary impulses, even in a romantic, comradely way (Georgy Ivanov himself studied in Yaroslavl in the years 1905-1908, and then in 2nd St. Petersburg Cadet Corps, and the cadets could never be suspected of extreme leftist intentions), the ideals that comrades talk about, that famous scientists write about. G. Ivanov, of course, understands that the ideas of radical socialism to one degree or another were sympathized with in those days and in one form or another by almost everyone, and in general by everything that somehow wanted to “develop” somewhere. However, it is unpleasant for him to note such a “general ideological fashion” in young Osip, in the youth of a genius. Perhaps because the brilliant lyricist Georgy Ivanov does not want to give any discounts to the genius of Mandelstam, because there is a separate demand for a genius? And therefore, the immaturity of the poem itself allows one to take away along with it some declared “revolutionary” views of their young author; for him these are sufficient reasons to close his heart from imperfection... (By the way, young Mandelstam is not young Mayakovsky, and about no matter how deep revolutionary, and most importantly, about strong Marxism in life and especially in the work of O.E.M., our Mandelstam scholars do not have to talk about, at least for now). And the poems are like a rebus, with a paradoxical key in the last image. Look at the last line, which explodes the entire poem: this bloody whirlwind, this tribe sweeping away the fruits of the fathers, the flame - has its own “children”! The connection between generations is broken - but it must be broken - it breaks every time, every generation of humanity. The new, coming generation of “their”, “own” children sweeps away their own “own” parents, and this is the “natural enmity” of history, the enmity of history with its values! From Jewish “property” (transferred to the chosen people of God from Yahweh, for safekeeping, - a gift from above) not one stone remains, this “property” now (“their” children, “their” fathers) is not transferred, but on the contrary - it fetters, these are chains, not the stones that the ancestors collected when building their temple, their stone fidelity and their faith. That which seems to be ready for harvesting, for gathering fruits, is in fact ready for burning and destruction! The most bitter thing that can happen in this world is for a devout Jew. is still saturated with the meanings of Western European Culture.

Is it possible to talk here about some kind of direct, unambiguous “revolutionism”, when behind the poems are Osip’s own impressions, who observed the dispersal of peasants in Zegevolde, the clash of one rightness with another rightness (now this is the resort town of Sigulda, located in Latvia, on the Gauja River(remember Voznesensky’s “Autumn in Sigulda”? - “I’m hanging from the carriage platform, goodbye...”),The town owes its birth to the Order of the Swordsmen at the beginning of the 13th century; several medieval castles and fortresses are still preserved around Sigulda; all this was observed by the 14-year-old Mandelstam). There is no triumph in the poems, there is no “historical necessity” that has always distinguished Marxism and Marxists who justify momentary sacrifices with future achievements, but they clearly build the tragic paradox of the “death” of humanity at the hands of their “own children”,when the word “children” ceases to be the word “heirs of creation” and becomes “an alien word”, “a guest word”: “heirs of destruction”. Both themes are heard at the same time, both historical righteousness and historical drama. The generation that stood up against their fathers is truly “uninvited and uninvited guests” - not children who grew up among the world of their fathers, but guests who came into it to pass by their fathers and past the world of their fathers; it was not for such “guests” that the generation of ancestors carefully prepared (cultivated) the world, their ancestors. (History does not want to stop in its eternal egocentrism, don’t even ask nature about this, just look at its terrible deeds - the young poet reads the then most popular Henri Bergson). The generation of fathers is doomed to be destroyed and scattered - and the destroyers-children are internally prepared for the fact that their children will one day destroy the world and war they have built (Remember - Leo Tolstoy no longer had enough “world” to describe his world, he needed besides peace also means “war”). And Mandelstam, who at this time is saturated with everything at once, incl. classical European culture, its main texts, is not ready, not at all ready for such an experience of history as its regular nihilism and cultural suicide. If the poet were revolutionary, he would express such breakdown in solemn words. But who hears triumph in these lines? They are filled to the brim with tragedy. (And G. Ivanov, as sometimes happens in his memoirs, is disingenuous (there is a difference between the subjectivism characteristic of any memoir and individual deceit in the assessments of its authors), this time noting openly left-wing poems where they are simply not good enough on their own to himself, while G. Ivanov remembered them by heart all his life. But Ivanov can be understood when he did not want to see something imperfect where, just a year later, real miracles of poetic speech and masterpieces of Russian poetry would begin to appear in the world. Children - their generation, unbidden in their inexorable and unstoppable goal, missions - killing in essence, and the deeds of their fathers, and the very generation of their fathers - such is this terrible thought.

The idea of ​​breakage and destruction directly contrasts with the idea of ​​biblical continuity, Jewish Tradition, the biblical understanding of history as the transfer of fruits - “the works of the people of God” - to a new generation, for the further transfer of the fruits multiplied by this generation into the hands of the next generation, and so on. fruits accumulated with such difficulty by mankind, the destruction of a specific historical value, for the sake of, in essence, historical whim (or historical lust), these two themes conflict in the mind of the young poet, who at this time is saturated with both Biblical-Jewish, and especially European Western Cultures - the young man reads a lot, and of course the conflict from this is largely bookish, theoretically distinct, this conflict, with all its complexity, finds expression in the poems, in their sharpened refrain, in the backhand ending about the “children” killers. It is “children”, no more abstractly: “messengers” or “results”, or even “heirs”, precisely those raised and nurtured by us - “children”, which puts the author who claims this in the position of “fathers”: “we leave” , “we are waiting,” hence the obvious connotation of “biblical fathers” - and their not at all biblical “children.” And one last thing. It’s so scary that perhaps only children and teenagers themselves can write about children. The image of child killers is elusive, phantasmagoric at least (Grimm, Hoffmann), it is difficult for an adult poet to saturate it with real content, a mother or a family man cannot approach it, but a teenager composing poetry could well use it as a concept that came to hand, - at this time the child is only partially alienated from childhood in order to talk about children on behalf of abstract fathers, but the nourishing spiritual forces of childhood are still palpable and fresh, forcing him to feel and imprint the way childhood feels. Thus, “children-guests” are at the same time alien to the house of their fathers, like any “guests”, in their trans-temporal verdict to “take their fathers out of the history” that they share, and at the same time they are “children”, blood-related, historically connected with them.

In 1906, the outstanding poet Osip Mandelstam wrote the following poem:

Among the forests dull and abandoned,
Let the grain remain unmown in the fields!
We are waiting for uninvited and uninvited guests,
We are waiting for guests!

Let the unripe ears rot!
They will come to the yellowed fields,
And don’t put up with you, honest and brave ones,
Your heads!

They will trample the golden fields,
They will dig up shady cemeteries,
Then he will loosen their unclean lips
Bloody hops!

They will burst into the blackened huts,
They will light a fire, intoxicated, brutal...
The old man's white gray hairs will not stop them,
Not a child's cry!

Among the forests, dull and abandoned,
We leave the grain unmown in the fields,
We welcome uninvited and uninvited guests.
Your children!

At the beginning of the century, the poet felt what would happen in Russia in the 30s, when the children of those who were born, like Mandelstam himself, in the last decade of the 19th century, would become adults. And these “own children” contain the terrible and merciless meaning of the poem, the author of which foresaw distant events, an impending catastrophe.

In 1911, he noted in his diary: “Everything is crawling, the threads of the seams are quickly rotting from the inside (“they are rotting”), but the outside remains visible.”

And here are his impressions of the Easter days of 1912, in which there is no longer any sun, no Easter joy, no stability of traditional life itself: “Frost, black crowds, police, dying bishops trudge, staggering along the walkway between two trellises of mounted gendarmes. The command is heard all the time. Peter and the cathedral are covered in white snow spots, a piercing wind, the Neva is all covered in ice, except for the black hole along the shore - heavy, thick water.”

Then the same wind will blow and whistle in his prophetic poem “The Twelve,” which his contemporaries will not be able to understand and the meaning of which is only now beginning to reach us. The poet called this wind black. “Wind, wind in the whole wide world.” For Blok, the time between the two revolutions, February and October, was filled with prophetic dreams, voices and an ever-growing sense of impending disaster. He prophetically accurately called the events of the inter-revolutionary period “a whirlwind of atoms of the cosmic revolution.”

Listening to the city noise at night, he caught some other hum behind it. Then this happened again in 1918, but more clearly and definitely. “...during and after the end of “The Twelve,” wrote Blok, “for several days I felt physically, auditorily, a great noise around - a continuous noise (probably the noise from the collapse of the old world) ...

The truth is that the poem was written in that exceptional and always short time when a passing revolutionary cyclone creates a storm in all seas - nature, life and art...”

In this regard, I would like to quote from Living Ethics. “Sometimes you hear,” it is written there, “as if screaming and a roar of voices. Of course, this is an echo of the layers of the Subtle World.”

In 1921, another outstanding poet A. Bely wrote the following poems:

At the time when these lines were written, Curie's successor, Joliot-Curie, continued only to investigate the phenomenon of radioactivity. And no one, not even the researcher himself, could imagine the terrible thing that would happen to the world - the splitting of the atom, which would bring death to many thousands of people.

The work of the great Russian writer F.M. Dostoevsky had the most pronounced prophetic character. “He is the prophet of the Russian revolution,” wrote N.A. Berdyaev, “in the most indisputable sense of the word. The revolution took place according to Dostoevsky. He revealed its ideological foundations, its internal dialectics and gave its image. From the depths of the spirit, from internal processes, he comprehended the character of the Russian revolution, and not from the external events of the empirical reality surrounding him.”