At Russia Beyond the Headlines novelist Zakhar Prilepin has written a broadside against the neglect of contemporary Russian literature, ongoing simplifications of Russia he sees coming from the West, and makes a case for a non-parodic, traditional, conservative form of Russian writing as it existed in the time of Tolstoy and Chekhov. Well, he is […]
It seems Russian book banning mania has not abated since I last wrote about the subject not all that long ago. The latest target – novelist Boris Akunin, author of the successful Erast Fandorin detective series among others. On October 27 the news got out that the senior investigator of the Moscow branch of the […]
Earlier this year Vasyl Shklyar refused the Shevchenko Prize and the $32,000 in prize money as a protest against what he considers the anti-Ukrainian policies of current Minister of Education Dmytro Tabachnyk. In an essay I linked to previously novelist Andrey Kurkov referred to Black Raven as “a rare literary scandal,” for being nominated for […]
There I was, taking a perfectly innocent stroll through the woods, passing an overturned tree stump I had seen a thousand times before when I made out a shadowy figure lingering behind it, standing there suspiciously still. He looked Russian, though it was hard to tell because it was foggy and he had such a […]
Banned Books Week was recently celebrated in the US but the Russian Orthodox Church is choosing to mark the occasion with a somewhat different approach. Moscow Patriarchate PR director Vsevolod Chaplin stated that Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez should be banned because they “romanticize perverted passions that […]
The first installment of literalab: Best Reads, in which sometimes neglected books from and about Central and Eastern Europe are put in the spotlight they deserve .. The Degaev Affair That reality is stranger than fiction must once have been an original and thought-provoking point. Today, it is taken for granted, a cliché even, leaving […]
When I hear of looted cultural artifacts I think of the image of train cars stuffed with Old Master paintings and objets d’art steaming back in the opposite direction of equally packed troop trains. Then come accusations and bitter quarrels, pleas of national patrimony and then lawsuits and more lawsuits. In fact many of the […]
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 […]
The London Book Fair will take place from April 11 – 16th with a focus on contemporary Russian literature. The lineup includes the presence of 50 of the country’s most prominent writers and literary figures, including the author of the modern classic Pushkin House Andrei Bitov, Ludmila Ulitskaya and Boris Akunin among many others. Paying […]
Choosing a new translation of a lesser known work by Leo Tolstoy – How Much Land Does a Man Need – for its inaugural publication, as Calypso Editions has done, might not seem the most typical choice for an independent publisher. The short story is a moral fable of a peasant lured by the devil […]
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