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Mysteries at the heart of Stalin's empire
Gregory Freidin:
Last year’s most talked-about work of fiction in Russia raises postmodern (or post-Soviet) questions
"Never in my life have I taken first place”, muses the narrator of Kamennyi most (The Stone Bridge), as he lines up his toy soldiers on a flea market stall in Moscow on a quiet autumn Sunday in 1998. Such is the opening of Alexander ( Read more... ) -
The man looked like a cat: M. Idov reviews Stalin in Russian Satire by Karen L. Ryan
... the mustached Stalin was incredibly easy to turn into either a cat or a cockroach because of a linguistic quirk, one that Ryan knows and acknowledges: in Russian, the word usy means “mustache” as well as “whiskers” and “feelers.” The human-mustache meaning is at the center of that cluster, however, so both the cat and the cockroach, in the ( Read more... ) -
“Околоноля”: книга нулевых, или Правительство как первый писатель
Натан Дубовицкий. Околоноля [gangsta fiction] / “Библиотека Русского Пионера”. Т.1. 2009.
...Другое дело, что роман получился очень старомодный, из тех самых постмодернистских 90-х, которые Кремль первым и предал анафеме, обозвав “лихими”. Кстати, в полном согласии с традицией - преданных анафеме Стеньку Разина и Емельку Пугачева называли ( Read more... ) -
Liam Julian on The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism by Nicholas Fox Weber.
Art as Manifesto
by Liam Julian
Nicholas Fox Weber. The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism. Knopf, 544 pages. $40
Bauhaus is back. With the 90-year anniversary of the founding of the famed German school of art and craft and design - the school that calls to mind sharp corners and flat roofs, glass and steel and exposed materials, simple ( Read more... )
