Yesterday I posted about an article defining the influence of Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilych on the psychological and medical approach to death. It turns out that the usefulness of Russian literature goes beyond the medical profession, as Thomas de Waal points out in an excellent article in Foreign Policy. With a tip […]
The Best Translated Book Award’s longlist was just announced and its 25 titles contain a handful of novels from this part of the world: Poland: Stone Upon Stone by Wiesław Myśliwski, In Red by Magdalena Tulli Hungary: Fiasco by Imre Kertész, Kornél Esti by Dezső Kosztolányi Serbia: Leeches by David Albahari French novels dominate the […]
Wisława Szymborska died on February 1 and as the remembrances and tributes pour forth a couple of very good ones that have come out in the last few days include Ruth Franklin’s “A Requiem to an Age of Brilliant Polish Poetry” at The New Republic and James Hopkin’s recollection of an interview with the poet […]
The latest issue of The Hungarian Quarterly is out and contains an interview with László Krasznahorkai, whose novel Satantango is due to be published in February. The issue also has an excerpt from the book. Other articles of interest include an interview with pianist and regular NYRB contributor Charles Rosen talking quite a bit about […]
In a burst of end of the year cheer British political philosopher John Gray wrote an article on the BBC about the myth of progress in light of the ongoing collapse of European institutions, if not of free-market capitalism altogether. I can see his point as far as puncturing simplistic, utopian tendencies – as if […]
The director of films as brilliant and varied as Night and the City, Du rififi chez les hommes and The Naked City was born a hundred years ago today in Middletown, Connecticut. Considering he was blacklisted in 1950 and spent almost the entire rest of his life (he died in 2008 at 96) in Europe, […]
Slovakia’s Project Forum website Salon has an article by Polish novelist Michał Witkowski in which he gets at the situation in contemporary Poland by dividing European life into its Catholic and Protestant elements. Not being one or the other I have to take his word for it, but his choices seem right on and besides […]
The Fall 2011 issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review is out and devoted to the former USSR. There is an excellent selection of essays, fiction and poetry some of which is available online. There is too much good stuff to single out anything, but a couple pieces worth noting are Jason Motlagh’s essay “Dark Days […]
The second installment of Peter Mendelsund’s series of essays on jacketing fiction is up, in which he asks whether designers “are, or should be, in the business of representing the underlying themes put forward by the works of fiction that we are charged with making jackets for.” There is a lot of Central and Eastern […]
“I like the bigness and darkness of 19th-century Russian literature. (I brought Crime and Punishment with me on my honeymoon.)” – Roddy Doyle [No word on what his wife brought]. Roddy Doyle, of The Commitments fame, has a brilliant article in The Irish Times on his translation of Gogol’s The Government Inspector currently playing in […]
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