In Soviet Bucharest, Christmas is a time of scarcity. The festive day is rescued by an unusual tree, and the joy of family that never recedes. Continue Reading ...
Don’t be fooled by the red banners and the iconic agitprop: this exhibition is more of an ossuary for failed utopias than a May Day parade. Continue Reading ...
Dylan Brethour tells the tragic tale of the Mandelstams – poet Osip and writer Nadezhda – whose harrowing experience of persecution, exile and betrayal exposed the USSR’s excesses. ...
Xenobe Purvis reviews Julian Barnes’s impressionistic biography of Dmitri Shostakovich, his first novel since 2011’s Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending. Continue Reading Power and Irony: The Noise ...
Published for the first time in English, Ismail Kadare’s exploration of writing, realism and censorship moves between the everyday and mythic in Soviet Moscow. Continue Reading Book Review: ...
Amid the release of two members of Pussy Riot, Charlotte Fereday looks at the Russian protest band’s adoption of one of the essential mantras of the Spanish Civil War. ...
To read, The Master and Margarita is a stunning yet at times bewildering novel. The very fact that it has ever been adapted for the stage is worthy of applause. ...
