Translator Alex Cigale has spent years working on bringing the “lyrical excesses” of Anatoly Mariengof’s Russian prose from his 1928 novella Cynics into English. In the latest Saturday European Fiction in B O D Y he offered up a sample of some of Mariengof’s shorter prose in “Aphorisms, Anecdotes, And Other Literary Trifles” and now […]
Beauty in Hell: Culture in the Gulag is an online exhibition at The Hunterian at the University of Glasgow on one of the Soviet Union’s earliest prison camps, Solovki. Recently, B O D Y published a poem by a former Solovki inmate Yury Kazarnovsky, “Tram“, and an example of some of the amazing cultural and […]
Way back in 2013 when the world wasn’t utterly collapsing I had the foresight to publish an excerpt from Balla’s novella In the Name Of the Father, translated from the Slovak by Julia and Peter Sherwood. Now the book has been published by Jantar Publishing and translator Charles Sabatos has written about it in the […]
“Prilepin has not merely turned inside out the consciousness of the entire post-Perestroika generation of politicized young Russians and laid it bare, but he also, in large part, predicted the patterns of development of radical political groups and the government’s strategy in combatting them.” This is from Alexei Navalny’s introduction to Sankya by Zakhar Prilepin, […]
B O D Y has announced its six Pushcart Prize nominees and the two fiction writers among them were Russia’s Zakhar Prilepin for the excerpt from his novel Sankya, published this year by Dzanc Books and Hungary’s Sándor Jászberényi for The Devil Is A Black Dog, the title story of his soon-to-be published story collection […]
Russian Literature Week begins on Monday Dec. 1 in NYC, consisting of live and online events celebrating the translation of contemporary and classic Russian writing. There will be panel discussions, roundtables and readings with leading writers, translators and publishers as well as film screenings focusing on writers from Pushkin to Prilepin. Many of the participants […]
The ninth annual Big Book Prize has gone to Zakhar Prilepin for his novel The Cloister. He beat out Vladimir Sorokin, who came in second with his novel Tellurium, and Vladimir Sharov, who came in third with Return to Egypt. In an article written when the shortlist was announced about six months ago in Publishing […]
A Russian military invasion has been at the top of the headlines, and with the publication of the opening chapter of Zakhar Prilepin’s novel Sankya in B O D Y last weekend, it’s timely to point to an excellent article by Phoebe Taplin in Russia Beyond The Headlines (RBTH) on the long Russian literary tradition […]
“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 […]
The 4th Slovo Russian Literature Festival is well underway in London. Running from March 5 to 26 the festival celebrates Russian literature old and new, along with the links between the two. This is well illustrated by lectures being given on March 15 by contemporary novelist Dmitry Bykov (Living Souls, 2011) on Boris Pasternak and […]
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