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Klotsvog
Klotsvog is a novel about being Jewish in the Soviet Union and the historical trauma of World War II—and it’s a novel about the petty dramas and demons of one strikingly vain woman. Maya Abramovna Klotsvog has had quite a life, and she wants you to know all about it. Selfish, garrulous, and thoroughly entertaining, she tells us where she came from, who she didn’t get along with, and what became of all her husbands and lovers. In Klotsvog, Margarita Khemlin creates a first-person narrator who is both deeply self-absorbed and deeply compelling. From Maya’s perspective, Khemlin unfurls a retelling of the Soviet Jewish experience that integrates the historical and the personal into her p...
The Life Written by Himself
Moscow in the middle of the seventeenth century had a distinctly apocalyptic feel. An outbreak of the plague killed half the population. A solar eclipse and comet appeared in the sky, causing panic. And a religious reform movement intended to purify spiritual life and provide for the needy had become a violent political project that cleaved Russian society and the Orthodox Church in two. The autobiography of Archpriest Avvakum—a leader of the Old Believers, who opposed liturgical and ecclesiastical reforms—provides a vivid account of these cataclysmic events from a figure at their center. Written in the 1660s and ’70s from a cell in an Arctic village where the archpriest had been impri...
Taking the Alhambra to St. Petersburg
Ein wenig bekanntes Phänomen innerhalb des sogenannten Maurischen Revivals ist die intensive Auseinandersetzung russischer Architekten mit der ibero-islamischen Architektur, insbesondere mit den mittelalterlichen Nasridenpalästen der Alhambra in Granada. Die materialreiche Studie analysiert orientalisierende Bauwerke und Interieurs des 19. Jahrhunderts in St. Petersburg und zeichnet die Transferwege nach, über die das Formenvokabular der Alhambra von Spanien nach Russland gelangte. Sie bezieht wesentliche Aspekte der russischen Kulturgeschichte und der europäischen Orient-Vorstellungen des 19. Jahrhunderts mit ein und zeigt, dass russische Architekten und die Kaiserliche Akademie der Künste zu den Pionieren des Maurischen Revivals gehörten. Erstmalige Betrachtung der orientalisierenden Architektur St. Petersburgs im gesamteuropäischen Kontext Russische Architekten als Pioniere des Maurischen Revivals
The Man Who Couldn't Die
In 1990s Russia, the wife and stepdaughter of a paralyzed veteran conceal the Soviet Union’s collapse from him in order to keep him—and his pension—alive. Olga Slavnikova’s The Man Who Couldn’t Die tells the story of how two women try to prolong a life—and the means and meaning of their own lives—by creating a world that doesn’t change, a Soviet Union that never crumbled. After her stepfather’s stroke, Marina hangs Brezhnev’s portrait on the wall, edits the Pravda articles read to him, and uses her media connections to cobble together entire newscasts of events that never happened. Meanwhile, her mother, Nina Alexandrovna, can barely navigate the bewildering new world out...
Necropolis
In this unique literary memoir, “the greatest Russian poet of our time” pays tribute to the major authors of Russian Symbolist movement (Vladimir Nabokov). In Necropolis, the poet Vladislav Khodasevich turns to prose to memorializes some of the greatest writers of late 19th and early 20th century Russia. In the process, he delivers an insightful and intimate eulogy of the era. Recalling figures including Alexander Blok, Sergey Esenin, Fyodor Sologub, and the socialist realist Maxim Gorky, Khodasevich reveals how their lives and artworks intertwined, including a notorious love triangle among Nina Petrovskaya, Valery Bryusov, and Andrei Bely. Khodasevich testifies to the seductive and often devastating Symbolist ideal of turning one’s life into a work of art. He notes how this ultimately left one man with the task of memorializing his fellow artists after their deaths. Khodasevich’s portraits deal with revolution, disillusionment, emigration, suicide, the vocation of the poet, and the place of the artist in society. Personal and deeply perceptive, Necropolis show the early twentieth-century Russian literary scene in a new light.
The Nose and Other Stories
Nikolai Gogol’s novel Dead Souls and play The Government Inspector revolutionized Russian literature and continue to entertain generations of readers around the world. Yet Gogol’s peculiar genius comes through most powerfully in his short stories. By turns—or at once—funny, terrifying, and profound, the tales collected in The Nose and Other Stories are among the greatest achievements of world literature. These stories showcase Gogol’s vivid, haunting imagination: an encounter with evil in a darkened church, a downtrodden clerk who dreams only of a new overcoat, a nose that falls off a face and reappears around town on its own, outranking its former owner. Written between 1831 and 1...
Found Life
One of the first Russian writers to make a name for herself on the Internet, Linor Goralik writes conversational short works that conjure the absurd in all its forms, reflecting post-Soviet life and daily universals. Her mastery of the minimal, including a wide range of experiments in different forms of micro-prose, is on full display in this collection of poems, stories, comics, a play, and an interview, here translated for the first time. In Found Life, speech, condensed to the extreme, captures a vivid picture of fleeting interactions in a quickly moving world. Goralik's works evoke an unconventional palette of moods and atmospheres—slight doubt, subtle sadness, vague unease—through a...
The Voice Over
Maria Stepanova is one of the most powerful and distinctive voices of Russia’s first post-Soviet literary generation. An award-winning poet and prose writer, she has also founded a major platform for independent journalism. Her verse blends formal mastery with a keen ear for the evolution of spoken language. As Russia’s political climate has turned increasingly repressive, Stepanova has responded with engaged writing that grapples with the persistence of violence in her country’s past and present. Some of her most remarkable recent work as a poet and essayist considers the conflict in Ukraine and the debasement of language that has always accompanied war. The Voice Over brings together...
A Double Life
An unsung classic of nineteenth-century Russian literature, Karolina Pavlova’s A Double Life alternates prose and poetry to offer a wry picture of Russian aristocratic society and vivid dreams of escaping its strictures. Pavlova combines rich narrative prose that details balls, tea parties, and horseback rides with poetic interludes that depict her protagonist’s inner world—and biting irony that pervades a seemingly romantic description of a young woman who has everything. A Double Life tells the story of Cecily, who is being trapped into marriage by her well-meaning mother; her best friend, Olga; and Olga’s mother, who means to clear the way for a wealthier suitor for her own daught...
New Russian Drama
New Russian Drama took shape at the turn of the new millennium—a time of turbulent social change in Russia and the former Soviet republics. Emerging from small playwriting festivals, provincial theaters, and converted basements, it evolved into a major artistic movement that startled audiences with hypernaturalistic portrayals of sex and violence, daring use of non-normative language, and thrilling experiments with genre and form. The movement’s commitment to investigating contemporary reality helped revitalize Russian theater. It also provoked confrontations with traditionalists in society and places of power, making theater once again Russia’s most politicized art form. This antholog...
