Central European literary life
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Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Literary roundup: Anxious, dark and scary
László Krasznahorkai getting anxious in The New York Times, a host of Russian horror and the first of a series of Russian stories read out loud.
Photo - Spanish poster for Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath, one part of which is based on the 19th century vampire novel Vurdulak by Alexei Tolstoy (though he wrote it in French).
The End is Nigh (actually not)
Russian writers on what to do on the last day of human existence (though it turns out the world didn’t end) and pictures of a post-apocalyptic Moscow (see pictured).
Literary roundup: Dueling Mandelstam reviews and German writers in fashion
On a pair of opposing reviews of a new Mandelstam translation and a review of Joseph Roth’s letters that brings up some other German-language writers and their potential revivals.
Photo - Klaus Mann
Literary roundup: The first Prague expat poet and Pushkin’s Pushkin
On Elizabeth Jane Weston - “Westonia” - pictured above with her stepfather alchemist Edward Kelley in the Facebook game Assassin’s Creed: Project Legacy, who was an English poet in Prague at the time of Shakespeare (and much more famous than him back then). Also an interview with Pushkin Press and 10 Russian books on film.
‘Cynics’ by Anatoly Mariengof
Review of a Russian novella published in Berlin in 1928 and not in Russia until 1988. Brilliant and shocking in the extreme.
Literary roundup: Ukrainian Literature Day, another Bulgakov film, and Russian women writers
On an adaptation of Bulgakov’s Country Doctor’s Notebook starring Harry Po Daniel Radcliffe, Ukrainian Literature and Language Day and the who’s, what’s and why’s of today’s great women writers from Russia.
Photo - from A Young Doctor’s Notebook
Literary roundup:Russian literature in marked and unmarked museums
On finding (and not finding) Russia’s literary history in a museum in a villa in Odessa founded by a former KGB operative and in an unassuming looking Moscow apartment building.
Photos - from the Odessa State Literary Museum
Viktor Shklovsky for Kids
How many Russian formalist critics do you know who also wrote animation scripts? Really, that many? Damn.
For an article about Shklovsky’s adaptation of Yury Olesha’s The Three Fat Men and Pushkin’s The Golden Rooster, including links, click here.
Photos - from the two films mentioned above/© Animator.ru
Literary roundup: Libya through Hungarian eyes, Akhmatova weighs in, and the dark marvelous
A story from Pilvax Magazine from Hungarian writer and war correspondent Sándor Jászberényi, more on Solzhenitsyn and a story from the Italian master of the fantastic Dino Buzzati.
Photo - from the film The Desert of the Tartars based on Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe.
Reading Russia: yesterday and today, true and false
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.
Brilliant illustration for the article by Natalia Mikhaylenko, more of whose work can be seen here.
