The BBC and Lonely Planet have posted a “Mini guide to Kafka’s Prague,” which begins with the claim that though Kafka never mentions Prague in his fiction “his tales of totalitarian bureaucracy were greatly influenced by the city.” They then proceed to demonstrate this influence by listing some hotels and telling you about the Kafka […]
At Russia Beyond the Headlines there is an interview with Boris Pasternak’s nephew Nicolas Pasternak Slater talking about his translation of the correspondence between his family and his famous uncle as well as his current project of preparing a trilingual edition of his mother Lydia Pasternak’s poetry for publication (she wrote poetry in Russian, German […]
It begins in Berlin in November 1943 as British bombs gradually do their part in shattering both the illusion and reality of the Thousand-Year Reich. Sergey Nabokov, the gay brother of then still largely unknown Vladimir, blurts out a pro-English statement at the ministry where he works as a translator that he knows full well […]
A list of 14 writers from Central Europe makes up the semi-finalists of Poland’s Angelus Central European Literature Award. The prize selects books from the region that have been published in Polish the preceding year and has had its share of big name as well as fairly obscure winners over its six-year history including Petér […]
And the literary enthusiasm debate rolls on. What is it now – Round 2? Round 3? And this isn’t shaping up to be the type of debate that can be resolved by a decision. No, it’s going to take a knockout. The latest blows have been landed by the New York Times Dwight Garner (anti-enthusiasm) […]
“If the halls of the Hermitage were suddenly to go mad, if the paintings of all the schools and great masters were suddenly to break loose from their nails, and merge with one another, intermingle and fill the air of the rooms with a futurist roar and an agitated frenzy of color, we would then […]
In the latest issue of The Literary Review Alex Stein has an interview with Egyptian poet Yahia Lababidi that orbits around the figures of Georges Bataille, Baudelaire and Kafka. The first notable thing about this piece is that Stein has opted to rewrite some of Lababidi’s words to, as he states at the outset, “make […]
At The Brooklyn Rail, English philosopher Simon Critchley takes on the subject of contemporary art in an article entitled “Absolutely-Too-Much.” It’s a fascinating article, but what struck me was his outright dismissal of the novel’s cultural import: “It is simply a fact that contemporary art has become the central placeholder for the articulation of cultural […]
The Guardian reports that plans to memorialize the house exiled Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweig lived in London for five years were nixed by English Heritage (EH), the organization responsible for choosing who gets a blue plaque and who doesn’t. An EH spokesperson said that Zweig’s “current profile – which has never been as high in […]
Chtenia’s Summer 2012 issue is out and is devoted entirely to horses, with an essay on the animals’ role in Russian literature as well as translations of equestrian-themed work from Vladimir Mayakovsky, Nikolai Zabolotsky, Vladimir Sorokin and Alexander Kuprin among others. One odd feature of this magazine is that though there is a “Web links […]
literalab 