In The Moscow Times, John Freedman illuminates a striking parallel between the hysterical, xenophobic cultural attacks being directed against cultural figures in Russia and those carried out at the height of Stalinism: “I’ve seen this before. Not in my lifetime, no. I saw it unfold before my astonished eyes in crumbling, yellowing newspaper clippings from the late 1920s […]
The literary history of Ukraine’s Black Sea port city of Odessa is the focus of British novelist and journalist A.D. Miller’s article on the Odessa State Literary Museum “The Odessaphiles” at The Economist’s Intelligent Life. It’s a nice introduction to the city’s mythical place in Russian history, literary and otherwise, especially in regard to Isaak […]
At The Moscow Times, John Freedman writes about discovering that the unassuming Moscow apartment building he passed countless times had belonged to Russian/Soviet/Yiddish theater legend Solomon Mikhoels. As Freedman notes, Mikhoels performance of King Lear was his most famous and celebrated role along with that of Tevye the Milkman (best-known worldwide in adaptation in Fiddler […]
In Eurozine, Slavenka Drakulić has a far-reaching exploration of European identity by looking at two very different forms of change taking place in Italy. On the one hand, there is the influx of refugee immigrants coming to the island of Lampedusa and the southern coastal city of Bari. It is a story of incredible privations […]
Having come to his full powers as a writer whose novels and stories could not be published during Stalin’s growing stranglehold on power, whose plays could almost never hope to be performed, Bulgakov is now a hot commodity in the entertainment world. The latest news is that Stone Village Pictures – makers of The Human […]
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