“I was flying along at Uncle Gleb’s side, holding his hand. He yanked me off the escalator—you can’t look back—and into the underground snow palace, a kingdom of marble and white stone, with pillars instead of columns, with a never-ending dome stretching to infinity instead of a ceiling. Never in my life, my life on […]
It’s the end of the world and at Russia Beyond the Headlines (RBTH) they ask a sample of Russian writers such as German Sadulaev, Dmitry Bykov, Zakhar Prilepin and even Russian-American Gary Shteyngart about how they would spend their last day of human existence knowing the Mayans were right. The answers are interesting and unfortunately […]
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 […]
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 […]
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