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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Features
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.
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.
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.
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.
THE PRUSSIAN PROVINCE OF POSEN A RESERVOIR FOR MODERNITY
The small towns in the province of Posen became a nineteenth-century intellectual reservoir that fed German modernization. A new cultural interface had arisen where the Jewish tradition of text interpretation could interact with Enlightenment thinking and the new Bildung ideal in the spirit of von Humboldt.
Fashion Talks
The exhibition Fashion Talks: Fashion as Communication, which was shown for several months at the Museum for Communication, Berlin, was designed to explore — by looking at the messages conveyed by clothes — how people deal with fashion, both individually and collectively.
A megaphone for the “artist-politician”
The questions posed by this year’s Berlin Biennale are an expression of anger; over the lack of attention to issues that concern ownership of access to the public space, control of money, and frustration about how the art world is being controlled by increasingly few hands, even as events are increasing in number and being spread all over the world.
History on Trial in Vilnius
Earlier this year in Vilnius, the Socialist People’s Front leader Algirdas Paleckis was fined 10,400 litas (about 3,000 euros) for denying and grossly downplaying Soviet aggression against Lithuania the night of January 13, 1991.
gated communities poland holds the european record in housing for the distrustful
At present, there are probably more than four hundred gated communities in Warsaw and an estimated 75 percent of all new homes on the market in Warsaw are in gated communities. No other European capital has numbers this high. The tendency is the same in other larger Polish cities.