A Brezhnev era satire of Soviet repression, a book of short stories revolving around the siege of Sarajevo and poems from “Perhaps the most famous Russian poet of the twentieth century. ” In other words, beach reading. Poems of Osip Mandelstam Peter France writes in his foreword: “I have always been conscious that Mandelstam was an […]
One of the locus points of Russian satirical writing after the turn of the 20th century was a magazine titled Сатирикон – transliterated variously as Satirikon, Satiricon and Satirycon. It was published in St. Petersburg from 1908 to 1914, with a spinoff New Satirikon running from 1913 to 1918. Along with satirist Arkady Averchenko, the […]
Haaretz has a fascinating article on the rich but deeply conflicted life of the Hebrew poet and mostly St. Petersburg resident photographer Asher K. Shapiro. Having converted to Christianity on what he thought was his deathbed so he could marry his pregnant Orthodox Russian girlfriend Shapiro spent his life with the social benefits and personal […]
The new issue of The Critical Flame has a pair of reviews devoted to a new translation of the selected poetry of Osip Mandelstam, Stolen Air, by Christian Wiman and Ilya Kaminsky. Editor Daniel E. Pritchard pens a brief essay on the unusual practice of running two reviews of the same book. Then there’s Henry […]
Apparently it isn’t only filmmakers who misunderstand Kafka. In the Times Literary Supplement Gabriel Josipovici writes an article covering a number of quite varied books about or related to Kafka titled “Why we don’t understand Kafka” that brings a demanding yet even-handed take on the ultimate resistance to interpretation that Kafka’s writing contains. In a […]
“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 […]
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 […]
The two stories in BEF 2012 that stood out the most for me were Czech writer Jiří Kratochvil’s “I Loshad’” and “The Sorrows of Idiot Augustus” by Polish writer Janusz Rudnicki. The excellence of these two stories shouldn’t be all that surprising. For while these and other Dalkey anthologies try to give exposure to young […]
Today marks what would have been the 72nd birthday of poet Joseph Brodsky. Two months after his death in January 1996, Czeslaw Milosz wrote in Index on Censorship of what was at stake in Brodsky’s poetry: “In one of his essays Brodsky reflected that Mandelstam was a poet of culture. He too was a poet […]
The newly established Czech Book Award (Cena Česká kniha) has announced its shortlist of 20 titles out of 109 titles submitted by Czech publishers. A list of seven finalists will come out in April and the winner will be announced as part of Book World Prague on May 19. Shortlisted authors that can be read […]
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