“The chauffeur takes off his blindfold and leaves him in front of an unfamiliar villa by a lake. The door opens to a dim living room. Crackling embers in the fireplace. Some twenty masked people, cloaked in black habits. Latin plainsong…” From Absolution by Aleš Šteger, translated from the Slovene by by by Urška Charney […]
The ongoing Anxiety series at The New York Times features a contribution from László Krasznahorkai that might be described as a bit beyond anxious. “I’ve been living in complete silence for months, I might say for years …” it starts out, and gets worse (or better) from there. Russian Vampires Russian Life’s Chtenia 21 is […]
Big Russian novels are in the air as of late. At The Millions eight experts weigh in on George Steiner’s Tolstoy or Dostoevsky question. I read Steiner’s book a fairly long time ago and don’t remember him actually answering that question, which seems to be the standard reaction among the experts. Actually, I think the […]
“I like the bigness and darkness of 19th-century Russian literature. (I brought Crime and Punishment with me on my honeymoon.)” – Roddy Doyle [No word on what his wife brought]. Roddy Doyle, of The Commitments fame, has a brilliant article in The Irish Times on his translation of Gogol’s The Government Inspector currently playing in […]
Ten years after it came into print in English I finally overcame my reluctance to read Andrey Kurkov’s Death and the Penguin. So what was holding me back all this time? Honestly it was some of the reviews I read – the ones which talked about how the book provided a convincing portrait of post-Soviet […]
When Russian novels make it to the big screen it is usually because they either already have enough melodrama to turn them into marketable films (Doctor Zhivago) or because screenwriting assassins can be found to cut out the wordy parts and stick to the scenes of carriage rides, furtive kisses and duels. Recently though, a […]
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