Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Dr. Corin Throsby, a Cambridge academic, writes in The Times’ Literary Supplement: Byron knew, more than any author before him, the power of an ellipsis. Foreshadowing twentieth-century theorists such as Wolfgang Iser, who posited that it is primarily the reader…
I have never been to Sakhalin. I’ve been lucky to visit some other oil and gas places but Sakhalin is so far away from European Russia, it’s almost another planet. Last year, Sakhalin produced a little more than 3% of Russia’s…
Vladimir Yakovlev, the son of the prominent journalist of the Perestroika years, Yegor Yakovlev, sees no future for himself and his peers in Russia. His advice is sauve qui peut: if you can leave, just do it. Stanislav Belkovsky recommends self-improvement…
Say “the noise of time” to a Russianist or a literary-aware Russian, and the instant response will be: Mandelstam. This reaction is hardly universal. As Nikil Saval writes: Julian Barnes’s new novel, “The Noise of Time,” is about Shostakovich… The novel’s title…
In his memoir, Lighted Windows (1978), Veniamin Kaverin recalls scenes from Pskov in the first days after the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd: Kostya von der Bellen was a student from our class. He was very short, important-looking, jug-eared. A line from Chekhov’s notebooks – “A tiny…
At the Eurovision 2016 contest held last Sunday, the largest group of the Ukrainian callers who took part in the voting chose the Russian number. Azerbaijan and Poland came second and third in that Ukrainian poll. Russian callers awarded the most…
In his grotesque sci-fi novelette The Fatal Eggs (1923), Mikhail Bulgakov wrote of …the theater of the late Vsevolod Meyerhold, who died, as everybody knows, in 1927, during the staging of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, when a platform [lit. trapezes] with naked…
There’s an ongoing discussion of whether statues of Cecil Rhodes should be removed from the university campuses in Cape Town and Oxford. In their letters to The London Review of Books, Marina Warner and John Barnie point at the approach…
It’s a pity The Revenant is already taken: should Leonardo DiCaprio decide to play Lenin, it would be a perfect title for the film. It’s also regrettable that the Russian rendering of The Revenant chosen by the dubbers, Vyzhivshiy, simply…
Ten years ago – yes, eight days short of ten years! – Donald Pittenger ran this memorable post at 2Blowhards about the Russian artist Valentin Serov (1865-1911): Serov was an extremely talented painter. His abilities were apparent in childhood. And his blazing debut…
Masha Gessen wrote in The New Yorker three weeks ago: A Belarusian-language literature has been developing, and Alexievich has expressed regret that she cannot write in the language of her country. At present, the language of Belarus appears to be…
Svetlana Alexievich has been a major presence in Soviet and post-Soviet letters since 1984, when a censored version of War’s Face Is Not Female was first published. She has authored six documentary books: two on WWII, one on the Soviet…