Обращение в слух by Антон Понизовский
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Обращение в слух, which can be translated as Turning into a Listening Ear, is an important work marking the return of the so-called ‘novel of ideas’. The book won the biggest Russian literary prize this year – The Big Book.… Read the rest
Tatiana Moskvina (photo credit – Alexei Balakin, Wikimedia Commons)
Very often incredibly talented people are modest and underappreciated. Three years ago I have read a novel that thrilled me to pieces, it was called Shame and Purity (Позор и Чистота).… Read the rest
photo credit – Tom Murphy VII (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
I’m a slow reader and I prefer reading short books. I often find long books associated with poorly structured stories, with muddled middles, containing pages and pages of impenetrable narrative.… Read the rest
To me, books are not worth reading just for entertainment purposes. I want to learn something about the world and about myself, I want to be provoked into thinking about important issues.
Reading is a way to reflect, a mean for personal growth. … Read the rest
The Spy’s Funeral, by Hablot Knight Browne, Phiz (an illustration to Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities”, London, Wordsworth Classics, 1999, scanned by Robert Ferrieux)
Do you think real literature is becoming obsolete? Here’s what I think about it.… Read the rest
How many modern Russian books have you read or contemporary Russian authors you heard of? Outside Russia its literature is primarily associated with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Bulgakov, Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn. Their books are often in top 100 must-read lists. Yet, it’s strange that the riches of Post-Soviet literature don’t spread much to the West as if being stopped by an invisible barrier.… Read the rest