In n+1 Sophie Pinkham parallels Ukraine today and through the eyes of the great but largely unknown Kyiv-raised Russian writer Konstantin Paustovsky, when, for a time certainly, the country was even more messed up than it is now, if you can believe it. There are lot of terrifying, depressing, interesting and surreal facets to the […]
“Better still if I begin with the heart of the matter. That we are poets, and that life has already maimed us quite a bit. At the hearing, I will say what I had told my boss while he was writing my last check: ‘When you read biographies of the greats, you come across mention […]
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 […]
On June 13 the British Library is holding a seminar entitled “Balkan Day” with an absolutely fantastic lineup of Balkan writers that includes Dubravka Ugrešić, Vladislav Bajac, Igor Štiks, Andrej Nikolaidis, Muharem Bazdulj, Dragan Kujundžić, Christina Pribicevic-Zoric and Alex Drace-Francis. There will also be an event with Rosie Goldsmith “Balkanisation: the pick of recent Balkan […]
“I sat down on the edge of the couch. The Radiotechnika radiola was playing music, something non-Russian. Vova poured the rest of the wine into the glasses – there turned out to be just a bit left — and they drank up. I was sorry Igor had interfered, and that they didn’t give me any […]
“Shatuny [The Sublimes] was first published in Russia only after the collapse of the Soviet system. Before that, it was published in the West. The reaction in the West was unusual. One American reviewer noted that the world was not ready for such a book. I believe now it is perfectly ready for this book.” […]
In The Nation there’s a thorough and fantastic article about Bulgarian writer and exiled dissident Georgi Markov titled “A Captivating Mind: How Georgi Markov became the truth-teller of Bulgaria’s communist era, and paid for it with his life.” Playwright, novelist, essayist and journalist, Markov was murdered on orders of the Bulgarian secret service in London […]
Polish writer and journalist Jacek Hugo-Bader will be appearing at the Oxford Literary Festival on March 28 to recount “his journey through one of the remotest and baddest parts of Russia” in an event titled “Kolyma Diaries: A Journey into Russia’s Haunted Hinterland”: Hugo-Bader travelled the 2,000km Kolyma highway hearing the tales of those who […]
I have been expressing my admiration for Central European crime writing since I was practically a baby, but being a baby no one understood what I was saying, so it took until I started Literalab and began writing about it that my admiration took on intelligible form. Since then I have surveyed regional crime fiction […]
The shortlist for the Rossica Translation Prize 2014 has been announced for the best translation from Russian and it’s a pitched battle between five books. Interestingly, only one of the books’ authors is still alive, as one was quite famously killed in a duel (and that in 1837, so he wouldn’t be showing up at […]
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