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…
| April 23, 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…
| April 23, 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…
| February 14, 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…
| January 27, 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…
| November 15, 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…
| October 24, 2014
The eighteen stories of this 2007 book by György Dragomán, a Transylvanian Hungarian, can be enjoyed separately but also form a loose narrative set in the 1980s world of an unnamed country – undoubtedly Ceausescu’s Romania. Stretching over a period of about two years in the life of their narrator, 11-year-old Djata, the tales revolve…
| October 9, 2014
The subject of the Stalinist past was a controversial topic even within the Soviet Union and now is perhaps even more so in Former Soviet States. Given this, it’s not surprising there were mixed feelings in anticipation of Rethinking the Stalinist Past in Soviet Union (1953-70) an event chaired on September 23rd at Pushkin House…
| October 9, 2014
I remember this place, always will. I should have kept my mouth shut. Play with fire, right? But that was years ago. I can walk through Bucharest’s Gara de Nord feeling older and wiser, now. The big railway station looks so different today – modern, revamped. Shiny kiosks bulge with glossy magazines, rows of chocolate,…
| October 8, 2014
When Monica Porter first returned to Hungary, the country of her birth, she planned to write about her roots. The resulting book, The Paper Bridge: A Return to Budapest, was published in 1981 but the trip opened a door, quite literally, to a completely unexpected aspect of her past that, in turn, would lead to another…
| September 27, 2014