The Budapest Times has an article comparing the number of statues erected to notable figures with the idea that it will reveal something of “the intellectual and spiritual state of a nation.” Looking at the number of statues of writers put up since 1989 offers an interesting contrast: Albert Wass (writer): 49 Sándor Márai (writer): […]
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The Hitman’s Guide to Housecleaning
By Hallgrimur Helgason “Icelandic names are like Scud missiles. Their trail lingers in the air long after they’ve reached their target. Still these guys have my respect. Being a crime writer in the land of no murders can’t be easy. It seems you need the creative powers of a genius just to be able to […]
Literary roundup: Eugene Onegin by way of Krzhizhanovsky, and Russian novelists of the moment
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky has been receiving a lot of critical attention lately due to the NYRB’s publication of his novel The Letter-Killers Club (most recently today in the latest Quarterly Conversation) but it was another of his unpublished, unseen works that recently saw the light at Princeton University. For the 1937 centennial of Alexander Pushkin’s death, […]
Literary roundup: Putting Jewish history online and Hungarian literature into English
The New York Times has an article on the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s putting its archives online. The organization, which is known as “the Joint” (except perhaps among old-school gangsters) will be making its massive archives of photographs (100,000) and information (containing 500,000 names) available with a searchable index. The Times has a slideshow […]
Practical application of Russian literature
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 […]
Literary roundup: BTBA longlist, Tolstoy and death
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 […]
Literary roundup: New Russians of the literary variety, a woman in blue and yet another wannabe screenwriter
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 […]
Dostoevsky’s The Gambler: Modern and loosely based
In the 1974 film The Gambler, James Caan plays a Jewish college professor in New York named Axel Freed with an addiction to risk that causes him to fall into major gambling debt to some heavy-handed loan sharks. In the first classroom scene we see him in Freed waxes poetic about the issues in Dostoevsky’s […]
Ladislav Klíma’s ‘Glorious Nemesis’
“ … but what is a dream except the continuation of reality, or is reality the continuation of the dream?” – Ladislav Klíma, Glorious Nemesis In 1924 the first Surrealist Manifesto was published, elevating the blurring of dream and reality to an artistic imperative. That same year Franz Kafka was buried in Prague’s New Jewish […]
The nine lives of Arnošt Lustig
Documentary film commemorates humor and humanity of Czech writer who lived through and documented history’s darkest days Approaching the anniversary of Czech-Jewish writer Arnošt Lustig’s death on Feb. 26, 2011 at age 84, a new documentary film celebrating his life and work is being released, titled Arnošt Lustig – devět životů (Arnošt Lustig – Nine […]
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