Russian literature
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On the immutability of Russian history, Ivan Golovin, and Mikhail Lermontov’s poem “Farewell, Unwashed Russia” Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, the French say, and the expression seems tailor-made for Russian history. Certainly a perusal of any 19th-century text about Russia written by a chronicler at a safe distance from its borders would…
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Book in the spotlight: Stalin’s Scribe by Brian J. Boeck Of the five 20th-century Russian writers awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Mikhail Sholokhov was the most controversial choice. This is for two reasons. First, Sholokhov’s claim to fame depended entirely on his epic And Quiet Flows the Don, and he would have never been…
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Book in the spotlight: Notes of a Dead Man by Mikhail Bulgakov In March of 1936, the hilariously named Soviet newspaper Pravda (Russian for “truth”) published a scathing review of Mikhail Bulgakov’s play Molière. The review attacked the work for its supposedly flawed historicism and called into question its ideological soundness. Today the hit piece…
The Writings of Scriptor Adorans 