Skip to main content

Last Days of the Imperium

By

I currently find myself reading Ryszard Kapuscinski's Imperium that takes one on a journey through the final stages of the Soviet Union, visiting many cities far and wide and giving one a decaying portrait of this failed state.  Kapuscinski is a Polish foreign correspondent who has written many excellent accounts including books published on Angola (Another Day of Life) and Iran (Shah of Shahs) through Granta.  He has a wonderful wit and sense of irony as well as fantastic descriptive sense, leading the reader through various former Soviet cities much like the fictional Marco Polo in Invisible Cities.  If one is looking for an engaging and initmate view of what it was like in those last days of the Soviet Union -- this is it.

Comments

  1. James FergusonMarch 16, 2010 at 3:01 AM

    Let no man rest in peace. A new biography challenges Kapuscinski's journalistic approach, claiming that he blurred the line between fact and fiction in his accounts. However, Artur Domoslawski says that he did not set out to disparage the famed Polish foreign correspondent, and says he still has great respect for Kapuscinski. He has also made allegations that Kapuscinski had ties to the communist apparatus. Here's more,

    https://peek-a-boo.appspot.com/www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/02/ryszard-kapuscinski-accused-fiction-biography

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ward No. 6

By
Ward No. 6 is a short story written by Chekhov in 1892.  It has appeared in various collections of Chekhov short stories, including The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories translated by Constance Garnett in 1921.  In this story, Chekhov explores the inner working of a run-down lunatic asylum in a provincial town.  He  introduces the readers to a coarse porter who speaks mostly with his fists, various patients, a doctor who presides over this ward, and expresses his thoughts with a local postmaster.  It was recently made into a movie , featuring Vladimir Ilyin.  Here's a clip . There's also this very recent short film (30 min.) by Suzana Purkovic, with English subtitles.
18 comments
Read more

Myshkin's dilemna

By
Wrapped up Part II the other night and have to say that Dostoevsky certainly has a comic's eye, although one senses the potentially tragic undertones.  For Dostoevsky the aristocracy seems to be one largely made up of capricious souls more obsessed with good manners than any profound sense of their being.  This is particularly true for the Epanchins, who comically wrestle with their emotions in one scene after another as he places them in very odd and unnerving situations that test the limits of poor Lizaveta Prokofyevna's endurance. Of her daughters, Aglaya, is the most interesting.  A real beauty much along the same lines as Nastasya Filippovna Barashkov, who likewise seems to have a hold on Prince Myshkin's emotional strings.  Part II ended with Lizaveta demanding to know the extent of the Prince's interests in her youngest daughter.  The Prince insisted his feelings were Platonic, but one senses there is more to be said on the matter in later chapters. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Roadside Picnic: Life inside the Zone

By
If you're like me and wondered what the hell Stalker was all about, I would suggest reading Roadside Picnic , the book on which it was nominally based.  Tarkovsky took his idea from the character, Redrick Schuhart, a laboratory assistant and Harmont Branch of the International Institute of Extraterrestrial Cultures, leaving the rest up to the imagination.  The names were changed to protect the innocent. While Tarkovsky chose to shroud the story in mystery, the Strugatsky Brothers lay it out pretty clearly in their science fiction classic.  Redrick, the Stalker, has gone into the zone countless times but each time represents a new set of challenges, especially with the Harmont Branch cracking down on the plundering of alien objects left behind by a visitation to a small rural town in Canada. I suppose setting the story in a place outside Russia, allowed the Strugatsky brothers more room to explore new ideas and avoid heavy censhorship, but according to Boris in t...
Post a Comment
Read more