As the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues along with the war of information accompanying it there has been a tendency to turn away from anything Russian as a gesture of solidarity with Ukraine. What this leaves out are Russian voices of dissent, voices that speak out despite the growing and significant risks involved. Among those […]
The 6th annual Slovo Russian Literature Festival is underway in London, because with only the book fair going on there is a painful shortage of literary events in the British capital at the moment. The festival was opened by Boris Akunin, who will also be speaking this evening. Two other authors known for their novels […]
Boris Akunin’s Sebald Lecture delivered in London on February 4, is now available online. He talks about motherly manipulation, being tramautized by Steinbeck – i.e. everything you’d expect a lecture on translation to be about. But he also talks about the specific place of translation in the Soviet Union and how it was “cleaner” than […]
On February 4 in London, Russian novelist Boris Akunin will deliver the annual Sebald lecture titled “Paradise Lost: Confessions of an Apostate Translator.” Akunin, a pen name for Grigory Shalvovich Chkhartishvili, is known primarily for his historical mystery series such as the The Adventures of Erast Fandorin, but before becoming a famous writer was an […]
Are English and American writers missing an opportunity to write political novels? And Jo Nesbø talking about the ethics of a fictional treatment of last year’s mass killing in Norway. Last week was rough for novelists. First their ability to write philosophical novels was questioned, now they are being taken to task for their inability […]
It seems Russian book banning mania has not abated since I last wrote about the subject not all that long ago. The latest target – novelist Boris Akunin, author of the successful Erast Fandorin detective series among others. On October 27 the news got out that the senior investigator of the Moscow branch of the […]
Banned Books Week was recently celebrated in the US but the Russian Orthodox Church is choosing to mark the occasion with a somewhat different approach. Moscow Patriarchate PR director Vsevolod Chaplin stated that Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez should be banned because they “romanticize perverted passions that […]
The London Book Fair will take place from April 11 – 16th with a focus on contemporary Russian literature. The lineup includes the presence of 50 of the country’s most prominent writers and literary figures, including the author of the modern classic Pushkin House Andrei Bitov, Ludmila Ulitskaya and Boris Akunin among many others. Paying […]
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