literalab

Manuscripts don’t burn, but they can sure be kept locked away a long time. In February 1961, KGB agents came to Vasily Grossman’s apartment and confiscated the typescript, manuscript and virtually everything connected to the novel Life and Fate completed the previous year. Now, 52 years later and a mere 20 or so years after […]

On May 24, 1940 the great Russian poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad. And while the 71st birthday of the man who was viewed by many, including Anna Akhmatova, as pulling the country’s poetic tradition out of the Stalinist ashes may not be occasion for parades on the streets of Moscow or […]