Category Archives: Russian Literature

Links of the Week

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Many of these links have been tweeted in the past, but here I can tag and categorise them for future reference. I hope you find some of them interesting too. Please feel free to discuss in comments or on Twitter. Some of the links to PDFs disappear quickly so download them promptly.

'The Reader' - G. Richter

‘The Reader’ – G. Richter

Dr. B or : How I learned to stop worrying and love cinema post: The Gaze and its psychoanalytical implications in Richter, Graham and Beckett’s art.

Faust Series Opus 9 post: 13 Tips for a Writing Friend (After Benjamin, Baudelaire etc.)

Judith Butler’s Undoing Gender (2004) [Full- PDF] -”recent reflections on gender and sexuality, focusing on new kinship, psychoanalysis and the incest taboo, transgender, intersex, diagnostic categories, social violence, and the tasks of social transformation.”

This is treasure for me, discovering a trove of Guy Debord’s letters. ”Although I have read a lot, I have drunk even more.”

Bookslut reviews Viktor Shklovsky’s A Hunt for Optimism:

It lacks so much that readers generally gravitate to that even Shklovsky’s clinical prose can seem like an obstruction. But those that can tolerate the writer’s embracing of polyphony and multiplicity will undoubtedly see that there is a very serious mind at work.

These three interpretations of Charles Bukowski’s Melancholy are intriguing. My preference is for the first performance.

Salon’s review of James Wood’s The Fun Stuff. Enjoyed the review though I’ve no urge, presently, to buy the book despite enjoying much of Wood’s writing.

Full Stop’s review of Suzanne Scanlon’s Promising Young Women, which I expect to read some day:

This is the brilliance of Suzanne Scanlon’s debut: by casting Lizzie as a self-aware cipher in conflict with the critical reader, Scanlon refuses the same act of diagnosis that her novel critiques.

A collection of films inspired by Angela Carter, exploring the gothic, mysterious and magical themes of her work.

Three-part documentary about Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Indonesian writer of the staggeringly good The Buru Quartet.

Green and yellow: the colours of Brazilian Modernism.

Twenty years on, Elaine Showalter’s revised introduction to A Literature of Their Own. [PDF]

Leszek Kolakowski’s The Death of Utopia Revisited (1982).[PDF]

JM Coetzee on the novels of Saul Bellow.

Women on the market by Luce Irigaray (“applies Marx’s analysis of the commodity to the status of women – objects circulated by men to reproduce a male-dominated society.”)

Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground: A List of Ten

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Fyodor Dostoevsky

  1. Nabokov often displayed his contempt for Dostoevsky (whom he nicknamed Dusty) categorising him as one of the mediocre and overrated people.
  2. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which I read as a teenager, a dozen times, remains one of my favourite books.
  3. Having read Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Gambler as a teenager, I associated Dostoevsky with my youthful reading history. I’ve waited far too long to return to his work.
  4. Notes From Underground which I’ve read twice this week might be my favourite Dostoevsky but that could just be post-literal glow.
  5. Howard Devoto based Magazine’s Song From Under the Floorboards on Notes From Underground.
  6. Viktor Shklovsky suggested that the nameless hero of Notes From Underground is nameless because ‘I’ is all of us.
  7. Structurally Notes From Underground is possibly perfect. That is why an immediate second reading felt  essential, to try to unravel how Dostoevsky composed this extraordinary novel.
  8. The counterbalance of despair and the blackest humour in Notes From Underground is deceptively brilliant. It reminds me equally of Sartre’s Nausea, and Rémy Belvaux’s satirical film Man BItes Dog (1992).
  9. Nietzsche read Notes From Underground in French translation, and was a self-declared Dostoevsky fan.
  10. Notes From Underground is one of the books regularly credited with marking the beginning of the modernist movement in literature.

Links of the Week

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Many of these links have been tweeted in the past, but here I can tag and categorise them for future reference. I hope you find some of them interesting too. Please feel free to discuss in comments or on Twitter.

Kathy Acker Interviews William Burroughs.

“What is most true is poetic.” Leora Skolkin-Smith post about Hélène Cixous’ So Close.

Helene Cixous’ Stigmata – With Jacques Derrida introduction.

Senses of Cinema profile of Robert Bresson’s work.

“The meditative essay hinges on stillness ..” Thoughts on the Meditative Essay by Robert Vivian.

British Sounds (aka See You at Mao) by Jean-Luc Godard.

Writing the Biography of a Genius: An extract from Joseph Brodsky, A Literary Life by Lev Loseff.

Return of the Vanishing Spectacular Landscape – Fatigues, 2012, by British artist Tacita Dean.

Iain Sinclair review of Londoners by Craig Taylor.

The Natural Way of Things. A short story by Peter Stamm.

Vladimir Nabokov’s brilliant lecture on The Metamorphosis.

Wonderful interview with Kate Zambreno.

Carlos Atane’s controversial film adaptation of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.

Strangely compelling photographic journeys of Franz Kafka.

Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor animation with English subtitles.

Links of the Week

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Many of these links have been tweeted in the past, but here I can tag and categorise them for future reference. I hope you find some of them interesting too. Please feel free to discuss in comments or on Twitter.

Translations of works by Augusto Monterroso (by Adam Thirlwell).

Andrei Konchalovsky’s enjoyable, if not entirely accurate The Odyssey (complete film).

The first ten Penguin books – Treasures of the Bodleian.

New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies.

John Newman on Architecture and Aging.

An interview with Blake Butler (2012).

Angela Carter’s Gothic Bride and subversion of the white wedding dress trope.

Interview with Helen DeWitt including discussion about the brilliant Lightning Rods.

Now interconnected and fully searchable, the virtual digital Loeb Classical library.

Addicted to Chekhov – Lloyd Evans on why we’ve all become hooked on the Russian playwright.

Review of the terrific Madness, Rack, and Honey essay collection by Mary Ruefle.

The Precession of Simulacra by Jean Baudrillard.

Remembering Baudrillard: Wither Baudrillard’s World?

Static Mass’ take on Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse, an examination of nihilism and the death of God.

HTMLGiant’s review of Mathematics: (a novel) by Jacques Roubaud.

Michelle’s excellent review of Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva.

Links of the Week

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Many of these links have been tweeted in the past, but here I can tag and categorise them for future reference. I hope you find some of them interesting too. Please feel free to discuss in comments or on Twitter.

The unshackled cultivation of Rimbaud

Unsettling collection of photos of life in a 1938 psychiatric hospital

“Ridiculously beautiful locations are tough…”

The Paris massacre that time forgot, 51 years on

The TLS try to classify the ‘unclassifiable’ Clarice Lispector

Guy Debord’s letters (1957-60)

English translations of all 12 journals of the Situationists

Collection of photos of the uprising and general strike in May 68 in France

“Katie Kitamura has earned comparison to great writers like Nadine Gordimer and Herta Müller.”

Melville House is republishing Mary Maclane’s ‘I Await the Devil’s Coming’

Surrealism and the Literary Imagination: A Study of Breton and Bachelard

AM Homes is a ‘social arsonist’ (as opposed to an anti-social arsonist?)

Simon Critchley – 8 part series on Martin Heidegger & Being and Time

“if I can’t have womb tanks I don’t want your revolution.”

Read the first chapter of César Aira’s new novel, The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira

Links of the Week

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Many of these links have been tweeted in the past, but here I can tag and categorise them for future reference. I hope you find some of them interesting too. Please feel free to discuss in comments or on Twitter.

New Inquiry review of Anne Carson’s Antigonick.

Yale Books: Extract from Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life,

Lens Culture: Interrogations: terrifying real-life photographs from Ukraine.

In lieu of a field guide post: Snow Country by Kawabata Yasunari – “The novel suggests that both the purity of art and the ability to master one’s self can be derived from and conditioned by nature.”

Flowerville post: solstad/monikova: same but different.

Lauren Elkin essay: (The Quarterly Conversation): The Adversary: On Susan Sontag’s Journals (1964-1980). [Lauren Elkin's site]

Derek Jarman’s film, Jubilee (1978 / Full)

David Winters’ review of Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming’s Dead Man Working.

One of the richest resources I’ve found. I’d heard rumours that these existed but they were surprisingly hard to track down. Download PDFs of out-of-print Loeb Greek and Roman classics.

Notes Towards a Theory of the Literary Magazine: Part One, The Textual Condition.

Lebanese artist, Zena Assi’s work brought to life in animation.

Prabuddha Dasgupta is a favourite photographer, whose work I got to know, I think, through Geoff Dyer. “An ongoing journal of memory and experience, based on the everyday… family, friendships, places known, spaces occupied, journeys remembered…revolving around the core of a pivotal love affair.”

Geoff Dyer writes about his favourite Hitchcock film: The Birds.

Joseph Brodsky: Six Years Later

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So long had life together been that now
the second of January fell again
on Tuesday, making her astonished brow
lift like a windshield wiper in the rain,
so that her misty sadness cleared, and showed
a cloudless distance waiting up the road.

So long had life together been that once
the snow began to fall, it seemed unending;
that, lest the flakes should make her eyelids wince,
I’d shield them with my hand, and they, pretending
not to believe that cherishing of eyes,
would beat against my palm like butterflies.

So alien had all novelty become
that sleep’s entanglements would put to shame
whatever depths the analysts might plumb;
that when my lips blew out the candle flame,
her lips, fluttering from my shoulder, sought
to join my own, without another thought.

So long had life together been that all
that tattered brood of papered roses went,
and a whole birch grove grew upon the wall,
and we had money, by some accident,
and tonguelike on the sea, for thirty days,
the sunset threatened Turkey with its blaze.

So long had life together been without
books, chairs, utensils—only that ancient bed—
that the triangle, before it came about,
had been a perpendicular, the head
of some acquaintance hovering above
two points which had been coalesced by love.

So long had life together been that she
and I, with our joint shadows, had composed
a double door, a door which, even if we
were lost in work or sleep, was always closed:
somehow its halves were split and we went right
through them into the future, into night.

Links of the Week

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Many of these links have been tweeted in the past, but here I can tag and categorise them for future reference. I hope you find some of them interesting too. Please feel free to discuss in comments or on Twitter.

Des Imagistes, Volume 1 Number 5, February 1914, includes HD, Richard Aldington, James Joyce, Ezra Pound [PDF]

After the Cold War: Eric Hobsbawm remembers Tony Judt.

Flowerville post: Why is Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle a good book?

Biblioklept post: Stoner, John Williams’s Sad Novel About an English Professor.

María Irene Fornés’s play Mud (Part 1 of 5):  A dysfunctional love triangle.

A satirical, wild and irreverent story of rebellion, Věra Chytilová’s classic of surrealist cinema is perhaps also the most adventurous and anarchic Czech movie of the 1960s.

Emily Books post: A review of Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai.

Conversational Reading post: Four Questions for Kate Briggs on Roland Barthes’ Preparation of the Novel.

Complete Review post: A review of Bruno Jasieński’s I Burn Paris.

Side Effects post: Toward a Phenomenology of What About Bob?

Svetlana Boym essay: Nostalgic Technology – Notes for an Off-modern Manifesto.

Side Effects post: The Agoraphobic Homeworld – “How can the world become a home—how can we be at home in the world?”

The Possessed by Elif Batuman

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Tolstoy liked Chekhov on first meeting, saying, “He is full of talent and undoubtedly has a very good heart.” That the sentiment applies equally to Elif Batuman is the concluding impression on finishing The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them.

Describing the book as a “volume of memoiristic literary-critical essays about the experiences of a graduate student of Russian literature” Batuman has explained, “The Possessed is not the book I meant to write – it’s not how I meant to write it.” The statement would apply to most of Geoff Dyer’s books, a writer with much in common with Elif Batuman. Though these essays are purportedly about the major Russian writers, in practise these are a framework for her to digress enthusiastically about multifarious subjects including theory, the difficulties of translation and watermelon selection.

Though the quality is uneven, all seven essays display Batuman’s wit and erudition, and I could happily have read another seven. My favourite is the three-part Summer in Samarkand, a beautifully evocative piece of writing, revealing of both place and the characters Batuman met. Her carefully selected words to describe a language teacher: “Muzaffar, a philosophy graduate student, had pale skin, pale almond eyes, high cheekbones, and a floppy, sad, puppetlike comportment”, contrasts with the more rococo portrayal of the Vice-Rector Safarov, “a personage whose refrigerator-like build, rubbery face, and heavy eyelids brought to mind some anthropomorphic piece of furniture in a Disney movie.”

Batuman’s The Possessed sits at ease beside the essays of Geoff Dyer or Dubravka Ugrešić and I await with interest whatever she writes next.

An East European Reading List

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Unwittingly I’ve been accumulating quite a stack of East European writers to read, so I plan to tackle the following during the first six months of this year. My eastward direction is perhaps a guilty reaction to my failure to head west to pursue my commitment to the Savage Detectives Group Read. I’m consumed with Krasznahorkai at present and don’t wish to read anything else for a few more weeks.

  1. The Melancholy of Resistance – László Krasznahorkai
  2. War & War – László Krasznahorkai
  3. Sátántango – László Krasznahorkai
  4. Embers – Sándor Márai
  5. Parallel Stories – Péter Nádas
  6. Fiasco – Imre Kertész
  7. Dukla – Andrzej Stasiuk
  8. Memories of the Future – Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
  9. Theory of Prose – Viktor Shklovsky
  10. The Book Of Hrabal- Péter Esterházy
  11. The Foundation Pit – Andrei Platonov
  12. Skylark – Dezső Kosztolányi
  13. The Notebook / The Proof / The Third Lie – Ágota Kristóf