I'm amazed this blog still generates hits as I haven't posted anything of substance in years. The last post was simply a meander on my thoughts on the current state of affairs in Russia. I sorted through my Russian books as I cleaned my attic space in an effort to make more room for my ever growing vinyl collection. I kept my favorites upstairs, stuffing them into a narrow cabinet in one corner. Trying to fit everything into this small place made me think of a short story by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, in which he stumbles upon a magic paint that makes his tiny room grow bigger and bigger until he eventually gets lost in it. He was a forgotten writer until resurrected not so long ago by the New York Review of Books, which has since translated his short stories and novellas into five volumes . Well worth reading. There are so many of these writers who wrote during the Soviet era and whose works were essentially buried. Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita didn't c
The other night one of our guests said she was torn over Russian literature and culture these days. Should she read Dostoyevsky? Is it OK to listen to Tchaikovsky? She threw it out more as a question in general. Over the past year, Ukrainian officials have been urging persons to turn away from Russian culture as it is used as a means of propaganda. Certainly one can argue as I did in a post 9 years ago at the time of the Euromaiden protests that the notion of a "Greater Russia" has long been promulgated in Russian culture and is still very much alive and well, but does that mean I turn my back on Russian culture? I have lost interest in certain writers like Dostoyevsky who was an ardent Pan-Slavist but I like to think that if Chekhov was alive today he would be very much against this war in Ukraine and critical of the Russian government. Russia has been exposing its metaphorical and literal gun since it invaded Georgia in 2008, but we looked the other way until it bec