The European Culture Congress wraps up on September 14 in Wrocław, Poland. Among the literary participants were Dubravka Ugresic, Dorota Masłowska and science-fiction writer Jacek Dukaj. Umberto Eco, Václav Havel, and Amos Oz were all members of the Honorary Committee. Masłowska was involved in a collaboration with Polish theater director Krystian Lupa titled “Waiting Room. […]
Russian novelist and celebrated war correspondent Vasily Grossman is the focus of a conference at Oxford as well as a radio dramatization of his epic novel Life and Fate on BBC Radio 4. The conference is taking place on September 9 (which is today, so hurry) and includes discussions of Grossman’s work and life, its […]
Danielle de Picciotto’s Berlin memoir begins with her arrival in the divided city in 1987, though its story follows threads back into her and her family’s past as well as the dark, glittering history of the German metropolis itself. Artist, musician, filmmaker, curator, co-founder of the Love Parade and more, she brings a wealth of […]
On Dorota Masłowska’s play – “A Couple of Poor, Polish-Speaking Romanians” It is hard to be subversive in the 21st century. Writers and artists of all kinds have been aiming in that particular direction for so long now that it seems almost old-fashioned. And if you’re from what is commonly referred to as Eastern Europe, […]
An old relic of the Tsarist regime – Alexandra Sergeyevna Pumpianskaya – disappears from a Moscow communal apartment in what turn out to be the dying days of the Soviet Union, while her neighbors scheme over who gets the newly available square meters. A detective appears on the scene, as does an acquisitive, chess-playing locksmith […]
Polish quarterly magazine Res Publica Nowa has published a special English-language issue “Central Europe as City.” Besides the editorials, there are five articles from the issue available online on the Eurozine website and they contain some fascinating information. Articles cover an array of topics – from the multicultural history of today’s Bratislava to the Jews […]
Publishing collective Calypso Editions has followed up its new translation of Tolstoy’s How Much Land Does a Man Need and its collection of Polish poet Anna Swir’s poems about the Warsaw Uprising, Building the Barricade and Other Poems, with an anthology of Romanian poetry titled Of Gentle Wolves. Translated by Martin Woodside the slim book […]
On August 12, 1952 Yiddish literary culture received a fatal blow when novelist Dovid Bergelson and poet Peretz Markish were among 13 Soviet Jews murdered in Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison. The execution became known as the Night of the Murdered Poets, with three other poets also shot that night. The outcome of Stalin’s paranoid antisemitism was […]
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