Russian literature

  • The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #162: Emma Winsor Wood and C. Dylan Bassett

    The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #162: Emma Winsor Wood and C. Dylan Bassett

    “The miracle, in Kharms, is a kind of rupture within the physical structure of the world.”

  • This Week in Indie Bookstores

    You’ll never believe this amazing sales technique! A bookstore is making clickbait headlines from classic novel plots. Bustle highlights some unconventional bookstores around the world. April 29 is Independent Bookstore Day and a Seattle area store is issuing a challenge to…

  • The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #72: Laurie Sheck

    The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #72: Laurie Sheck

    Laurie Sheck is the author, most recently, of Island of the Mad, and A Monster’s Notes, a re-imagining of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry for The Willow Grove, she has been a Guggenheim Fellow, as well…

  • The Rumpus Interview with Will Evans

    The Rumpus Interview with Will Evans

    Will Evans, Executive Director of Deep Vellum Publishing, talks about publishing translated works as well as the Texas and Dallas literary scene he wants to help grow.

  • Round-the-Clock Chekhov

    More than five hundred people will participate in a global event to read the roughly fifty works by Russian author Anton Chekhov, reports Russia Beyond the Headlines. On September 25th, venues around the world will begin an online broadcast lasting 24 hours.…

  • Preserving Dostoevsky’s Prose

    What’s one English word to sarcastically communicate Russian cosmopolitan refinement? How would you translate a page-long sentence from Tolstoy, or “the cacophonous competing voices of Dostoevsky”? Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear (who have been married for 33 years) have translated…

  • Less Like a Communication

    This poetry was a poetry meant to be read loudly, breathlessly, full-throttle, full of sonic energy and internal rhyme. It felt less like a communication from a speaker to a reader and more like sheet music for a reader to…

  • The Stories of a Story-Hater

    “I hate literature,” wrote Varlam Shalamov in a 1965 letter. “I do not write memoirs; nor do I write short stories.” Despite his claim, Varlam Shalamov would become one of the most prolific Russian writers, producing 147 short stories about…

  • Exploring the “Russian Soul”

    For the New York Times, Francine Prose and Benjamin Moser share their experiences reading 19th century Russian literature. While Prose shows an appreciation for the timeless themes of Tolstoy and Gogol, Moser contends that what makes 19th century Russian writers distinctive is the…

  • Russian Novels for Rushing Muscovites

    In addition to boasting one of the most beautiful subway systems in the world, Moscow commuters now stand to become the best-read. Per the Guardian, over 100 titles from authors including Pushkin, Chekhov, and Tolstoy are now available for download,…

  • “The Czar and the Poet”

    When the people followed the Communists at the beginning of the twentieth century, they gave up Christ, but they found it impossible, as the revolutionary poets exhorted them, “to throw Pushkin overboard the steamboat of modernity.” Prominent Russian writer Mikhail…

  • The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup

    Happy Sunday! I’m in upstate New York at my sister’s college graduation. She’s really smart, like Phi Beta Kappa smart. However, she’s insisting that I play drinking games with her, which I haven’t done for like ten years, so posts…