Vasily Grossman and Hrachya Kochar
There is a great deal that we do not yet know about Vasily Grossman’s life. The widely held belief that Grossman lived out his last years in poverty and isolation is probably mistaken.
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Theme: Romania & History
Just in
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Robert Chandler: “any successful translation of poetry is a small miracle”
With a career spanning more than 20 years, Robert Chandler is one of the best known and most prolific translators of Russian into English. He has translated classic authors such as Pushkin and Leskov, as well as more contemporary writers like Grossman, and his translations of Platonov have won prizes. He recently completed a translation of Velimir Khlebnikov’s poem about the Volga famine.
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velimir khlebnikov and the volga famine
"Hunger" shows us Khlebnikov at his most compassionate; it may well be the only adequate literary response to the Volga famine of 1921.
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Winds of Change and the spatial transformation of post-socialist cities
The diverse mosaic of urban experiences in Prague, Riga, Belgrade, and Tirana is related to major drivers of change in the economic, social, and institutional environment. In mapping an analytical terrain for this comparative study, the “socialist city” is taken as the primary point of departure. One set of influences represents the outcomes associated with the transition to markets, democracy, and decentralized government.
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Feast in a time of plague the May Day celebrations of 1917–1918
For the celebrations of the First of May, 1917, all the buildings on the Palace Square, including the Winter Palace, were decorated for the first time with white drapes with red edgings and revolutionary slogans. Under the Bolsheviks, avant-garde artists assumed the right to develop art for the newly formed communist state, and the commission to decorate Petrograd for May Day 1918, was awarded to futurists.
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The stuff of myth and the Baltic Sea
Grass’s Flounder contributes to our work of locating, dislocating, and relocating literature in the Baltic Sea region by challenging us to give attention to the lost or hidden stories that are ignored or played off against each other in the official versions of history that would fix our position in space. While Grass counters the seduction of the big story — universal history — he also reveals himself by getting caught in the contradiction of his own storytelling.
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The apostles of Linnaeus of nature
Linnaeus’s ideas and the acts of his apostles coincide with a general definition of economy as the doctrine of wise stewardship of scarce resources, which could be applied to both nature and human society. But beyond this, the philosophical, economic, and scientific thinking of Linnaeus and his contemporaries was historically distinguished by the belief that resources, as for example the number of species, could normally increase in one place simply by shrinking in another.
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Exhibition in Moscow Soviet Design 1950–1980
Soviet Design 1950–1980 was shown for two busy winter months and enjoyed great public success. Even if Soviet design was often — but far from always — based on originals borrowed from the West, the individual objects exude a personal charm, variation, and quirkiness that makes them well worth preserving, exhibiting, and discussing.
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Tourism is endangering Albania’s cultural heritage
In Albania, its cultural heritage is threatened by tourism. Fairytale castle are being converted to hotels with no respect for their history. Albanians politicians believe that they cannot afford to preserve the past for the future, says reporter Axel Kronblom.
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Memory Caches
What was buried by Balts who were exiled to Siberia, before they were taken away? These finds are now being digged up as examples of modern archaeology. Helga Nõu remembers when, aged nine, she was told where a secret was buried and how she was sworn to never ever tell.