The story begins with a vain, preening, autocratic ruler of Russia willing to manipulate the forces of law and order to strike out against even the slightest traces of disloyalty. For him no charade of justice is too cruel or too absurd if it helps prevent dissension. Just such a sinister farce took place on […]
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Reading (and writing in) Bulgaria
New books, uncertainty, a seminar and why writers should attend readings in their national folk costume There is a lot of new Bulgarian literature available at Three Percent in connection with the Bulgarian Contemporary Novel Contest run by the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation (EKF) and the America for Bulgarian Foundation. First of all, the 2010 winning […]
Notes from underground: a look back at Czech samizdat
Czech dissident publications are put on display in New York, helping to bring a dark, courageous chapter of modern history back to life Since the death of Václav Havel on Sunday, Czech television has been filled with scenes from the ‘60s through the ‘80s documenting the dissident movement the former president and playwright played such […]
Václav Havel 1936 – 2011 – Dissident to the end
With evening falling and word of Václav Havel’s death already spread throughout the city, a line was forming in front of Prague’s Memorial of the student demonstrations of November 17th. Although the memorial itself is under cover people stood waiting outside under the winter’s first snow flurries to pay tribute to a man whose legacy […]
Writing on the Danube: Part 2 on Readux
The second part of an article in Berlin’s Readux on the Literature in Flux program and the river it took place on. Stories of piracy, swimming feats, drowning and love – some true, some fictional and some a combination of the two. What they all have in common is The Danube. Continue Reading Photo – […]
Jules Dassin at 100 – Absinthe #16
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, […]
Michał Witkowski and drinking Protestant coffee or Catholic tea
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 Soviet ghost, the hidden one and a lucky escape: new magazines
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 […]
A tale of two conspirators: Simonini and Degaev
I just wrote a review of Umberto Eco’s The Prague Cemetery and one area that I thought could have been (but wasn’t) most interesting in the book was the constant interplay between fiction and fact, with secret services paying informants for documents copied from the pages of novels to capture conspirators likewise acting out the […]
‘The Prague Cemetery’ by Umberto Eco
In the 21st century it is impossible to write the kind of melodramatic historical adventure novels made famous in 19th century France by the likes of Alexandre Dumas and Eugene Sue. It would be hopelessly archaic, a ridiculous undertaking, unless perhaps you add a few postmodernist touches, such as ambiguous multiple narration and piles upon […]
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