Yesterday I posted about an article defining the influence of Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilych on the psychological and medical approach to death. It turns out that the usefulness of Russian literature goes beyond the medical profession, as Thomas de Waal points out in an excellent article in Foreign Policy. With a tip […]
The Best Translated Book Award’s longlist was just announced and its 25 titles contain a handful of novels from this part of the world: Poland: Stone Upon Stone by Wiesław Myśliwski, In Red by Magdalena Tulli Hungary: Fiasco by Imre Kertész, Kornél Esti by Dezső Kosztolányi Serbia: Leeches by David Albahari French novels dominate the […]
The term “New Russians” used to refer to gaudily-dressed, designer-label loving, luxury-car driving, loud-talking Russians who struck it rich after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But now there’s another kind of New Russian touring the US at the moment. Five new Russian writers are on a tour of the East Coast, sponsored in part […]
In the 1974 film The Gambler, James Caan plays a Jewish college professor in New York named Axel Freed with an addiction to risk that causes him to fall into major gambling debt to some heavy-handed loan sharks. In the first classroom scene we see him in Freed waxes poetic about the issues in Dostoevsky’s […]
I’m not sure where on the scale of literary ambitions getting your face on a postage stamp should be ranked, but Prague-born writer Franz Werfel has just achieved this distinction. I have to admit to never having read a word Werfel wrote, though I have read a lot about him over the years. Last summer […]
I have already written a little bit about Polish fantasy writing in reviewing The Polish Book of Monsters, so now here is something from the fantastical side of the Czech Republic and Hungary. Czech monsters At the Czech Literature portal there is a long outline of Czech fantasy, dating back to its pre-1989 origins and […]
At various times since the fall of the Iron Curtain there have been outbreaks of fear that hordes of criminals would cross the Czech, Polish, Slovak, Slovene and Hungarian borders to pillage the wealth of Western Europe. In 2012, it looks as if this long awaited crime wave is actually coming to pass, though in […]
Jewish Book Week inaugurates its 60th year on February 18 in London, with a strong showing of Central and Eastern European literary events. Joseph Roth , Daša Drndić, Ludmila Ultiskaya , Umberto Eco, The Golem and more … “I have nothing to do with the landscape, nothing to do with the sky. Nor anything to […]
Wisława Szymborska died on February 1 and as the remembrances and tributes pour forth a couple of very good ones that have come out in the last few days include Ruth Franklin’s “A Requiem to an Age of Brilliant Polish Poetry” at The New Republic and James Hopkin’s recollection of an interview with the poet […]
February 10 was the date of possibly the worst of the tragic and premature deaths that have haunted Russian literary greats over the past two centuries. This was the day in 1837 that Alexander Sergeievich Pushkin died from the wounds he had received in a duel fought two days earlier with his brother-in-law and suspected […]
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