The term “New Russians” used to refer to gaudily-dressed, designer-label loving, luxury-car driving, loud-talking Russians who struck it rich after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But now there’s another kind of New Russian touring the US at the moment. Five new Russian writers are on a tour of the East Coast, sponsored in part […]
February 13 is the anniversary of the Dresden bombing that took place in 1945. The bombing continues to provoke debate and beyond its historical significance has a number of connections with literary and cultural history. In the Irish Independent Eoghan Harris writes about “The moral dilemma posed by Dresden,” pointing out the impossibility of a […]
Two nominees from Belarus have been put forward for the Nobel Prize in Literature and the names reflect the split between the Lukashenko-friendly, officially sanctioned and its opposite in the country. The official nominee of the Union of Writers of Belarus is Georgi Marchuk, his third time in the running. The head of the official […]
After arresting him and then throwing him out of the country the (admittedly different, i.e. not quite Soviet) Russian government is redressing the poetic balance by opening a museum to poet Joseph Brodsky in his former St. Petersburg apartment. The catch – the city government owns all the rooms of the apartment except one, and […]
On January 25, 1921 Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) had its official premiere at the National Theater in Prague (The first performances took place in early January in a regional theater in Hradec Králové). Besides being the writer’s most successful work it added the word robot to our international vocabulary. The play was […]
A Japanese expert on German-Jewish intellectual history refers to Kafka’s obsession with Yiddish theater in a lecture and the end result is a 28,000 word Japanese-Yiddish dictionary that you can own for the bargain basement price of $770. A fascinating article on Yiddish in Japan, from early Russian-Jewish emigrants to WWII refugees saved by Japanese […]
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