Central European literary life
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Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Literary roundup: Russian canons and man-made dystopias
An interview with Vladimir Voinivich on the dystopia he wrote about that now more or less exists, and about what a Russian Norton anthology might look like.
Literary roundup: Russian decadence, a duel and the man who never wore glasses
On a Russian contemporary lit conference and a translators ruminations on what took him from Klingon to Kuprin.
Photo - Onegin and Lensky’s Duel by Ilya Repin, 1899
How reverently is Pushkin’s legacy maintained in Russia? Even his statue gets a regular shave.
Leonid Tsypkin’s last few kilometers
There is something as poetic as it is sad that one of the great Russian-Jewish writers of the latter half of the 20th century worked as a pathologist (worked, that is, until the powers that be demoted and eventually fired him).
On a Tsypkin story in The New Yorker and an upcoming book.
Photo - Leonid Tsypkin/New Directions
Russian books and stories, or Tolstoy in a winter landscape
On the just concluded Moscow International Book Fair and the weird news coverage it’s gotten as well as an article on western writers turning Russian tragedy into the stuff of emotional bestsellers.
Photo - a stand at last year’s Moscow Book Fair, where visiting President or Prime Minister (whichever he was at the time) Vladimir Putin reportedly pulled any book from any shelf requested by audience members without the use of a ladder!
Literary Roundup: Russian horses, new writers and bodies from Prague
On Chtenia’s Summer 2012 all horses Russian lit issue, a story from the young “Queen of Russian Horror” and Prague literary mag B O D Y
Photo - Two Horses Red and Blue by Franz Marc, 1912 (I know he isn’t Russian but I like the painting, so . . )
Russian writer and journalist Vlas Doroshevich is not the only writer of parablelike stories exploring issues of justice and power who died in the 1920’s and whose work seems to illuminate the much darker period of history that followed his death, when the liquid that smoothed the grinding wheels of bureaucracy was revealed to be blood.
A review of What the Emperor Cannot Do: Tales and Legends of the Orient by Vlas Doroshevich
Literary roundup: reading material for the rest of your life
On Read Russia 2012, Estonian literature in the latest issue of Transcript and World Literature Today and some Berlin stories
The full image of the Commando Crackerjack comic that introduces my link to an entirley different kind of Russians in London phenomenon
Literary roundup: Russian writers in London and the literature of non-resilience
Photo - Portrait of E. Levina by Leonid Pasternak, 1916. Pasternak, the father of poet and novelist Boris, would end his life as an emigre, first in Berlin, then in London
