‘Gottland is about interesting people,’ Mariusz Szczygiel said at the opening discussion of Frontline cinema’s screening of the film modelled on his stories. Joined by Bloomberg News writer Doug Lytle and translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Szczygiel told us there are only two kinds of people in this world: those that are quiet and calm, and those that…
| 04/07/2015
Innocence, the posthumously published crime novel by Heda Margolius Kovály, comes heavy with expectation. It has been described the novelist John Banville as ‘a luminous testament from a dark time’ and a ‘must read’ by Cara Black. Then there’s the writer herself, author of Under a Cruel Star, one of the best – if not…
| 28/06/2015
‘Writers write. Actors read. Audience listens. Everybody wins.’ This is what Liars’ League promises, and what it delivered at its European Literature Night event on June 9th. The authors introduced were largely from post-communist countries, including Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and East Germany. It was refreshing to see, however, that this wasn’t necessarily why…
| 17/06/2015
Ana Blandiana,the greatest Romanian living poet, is both of yesterday and today. To many she’s known as a dissident poet. Born in 1942 in Timisoara, she had her first poem published at the age of 17.With her father a priest and political prisoner, Ana Blandiana started her career as an ‘enemy of the people’ and…
| 04/05/2015
Kundera is out of favour in the Czech Republic now. He seems to many to have disowned his Czech birth, writing in French and travelling to his country only rarely, incognito. Many believe the ‘revelations’ of a few years back, that in his youth he betrayed a friend to the secret police and a subsequent…
| 23/04/2015
I was 17 years old when The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Czech novelist Milan Kundera’s novel about the lives, loves and interior philosophies of four different characters during the Prague Spring of 1968 and its aftermath – came out in English, and one wonders whether there is a more fatal work for such a fatal…
| 23/04/2015
At Pushkin House, until 29th April 2015, is an installation by the acclaimed Russian artists Vitaly Pushnitsky and Olga Jurgenson. Curated by Elena Zaytseva, Akhmatova. Anrep. Berlin. is an exhibition that explores Silver Age poetess Anna Akhmatova’s relationship with two fellow countrymen, the philosopher-historian Isaiah Berlin and the artist Boris Anrep. The archives of Pushkin…
| 14/02/2015
After the first page I felt that I was going to love this book but I’m afraid it didn’t quite work out that way. The setting is a small Bulgarian town in the modern day and it’s a hungry, desperate world for three of the main protagonists, while in great contrast the other two live…
| 27/01/2015
The Burning of the World is a short but powerful book that lingers in the heart and mind long after the last page. A true story told through the eyes of a talented painter, it pulls the reader gradually into the most extraordinary and horrific circumstances imaginable, yet never loses its elegant style, or its…
| 15/11/2014
The Russian North is alluring for many travellers to this part of the world. Here one is likely to be taken aback by the sheer sterility of the flat horizon so close to the North Pole, an experience that is both charming and uncanny. So different from the popular Moscow and St Petersburg, or indeed any…
| 24/10/2014