The Pushkin House Russian Book Prize shortlist for 2015 has been announced and has some very interesting titles. It includes Polish writer Jacek Hugo-Bader’s Kolyma Diaries: A Journey into Russia’s Haunted Hinterland, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. You can read translations of Polish prose and poetry by Lloyd-Jones in B O D Y. The Zhivago Affair: […]
It isn’t only our own time filled with war and conflict. As the anniversary of the joyful and welcomed (by many) beginning of World War I is upon us, The New York Review of Books is republishing a recently discovered memoir of the war by Béla Zombory-Moldován entitled The Burning of the World in a […]
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 Leipzig Book Fair is underway as of yesterday, and as always there is a lot of eastward looking literary fare on the agenda, kicking off today with something about Euromaidan that has Yuri Andrukhovych, Andrei Kurkov and writer and singer Irina Karpa among the panel participants (I say “something about Euromaidan” because the program […]
“Sasha noticed some busses bearing the coat of arms with a fanged beast. The curtains in the bus windows trembled. People were sitting in those busses, waiting for an opportunity to step out, to run out, clutching rubber mallets in tough fists, looking angrily for somebody to hit, and to hit them with flourish, to […]
It’s Dostoevsky’s birthday today! Were he still alive, he would be eight years short of 200. It’s just as well that he isn’t though because like Solzhenitsyn in his cranky old age he would likely have a cable TV show that no one watches in which he ranted and raved against everything and everyone, except […]
“Russia’s regular historical paradox is that its rulers want one thing but the result is often something entirely different. Peter the Great wanted to strengthen the empire, but instead he placed a bomb beneath it, which destroyed it. In our time, Gorbachev wanted to save communism and instead he buried it.” Author of Maidenhair, Mikhail […]
The story begins with a vain, preening, autocratic ruler of Russia willing to manipulate the forces of law and order to strike out against even the slightest traces of disloyalty. For him no charade of justice is too cruel or too absurd if it helps prevent dissension. Just such a sinister farce took place on […]
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