Tag Archives: Crime and Punishment

Mikhail Kuzmichev in B O D Y

“But at the same time he felt sad, because his age was getting the better of some of his abilities, and revitalizing some of those he’d already lost, even at the pace his great talent would allow was, nevertheless, not part of his plans as a serial killer.” From “The Serial Killer”, the first publication […]

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Literary roundup: Eastern promise and Balla

Natasha Perova, editor of Glas New Russian Writing, has a very interesting piece in PEN America on the Russian literary scene in which she discusses the young generation of writers (some of which Glas publishes due to their association with the Debut Prize) and what differentiates them from the writers of the Russian and Soviet […]

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Literary roundup: Russian literature in Asia

Writing in the Malay Insider, Erna Mahyuni compares government interference in Russia and Malaysia through the prism of her favorite author Mikhail Bulgakov. Where Putin’s Russia has a new anti-protest law, Malaysia has a peaceful assembly law. And where writers in Stalin’s Soviet Union were pushed towards acceptable themes and subjects to write about, the […]

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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 […]

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Dostoevsky’s The Gambler

The number of films based on the writings of Fyodor Dostoevsky is approaching the 200 mark, which is not quite Dickens territory (324 according to IMDB) but places him above virtually every other 19th century novelist and ahead of all the Russian masters (Tolstoy, who has a big Hollywood adaptation coming to the screen this […]

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