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Marfino, the Sharashka “For these defects, and for no other evil, we now are lost and punished just with this: we have no hope and yet we live in longing.” — From the Divine Comedy: Inferno by Dante Alghieri, Canto 4, lines 40-42, translation by Allen Mandelbaum. “Do you know, Lev Grigorievich, this rush of […]
I found a few passages from books I’ve read this year that I did not include in any post. That is a shame in this case since it is a key passage in understanding Odintsova. I described her in this post as follows: “a wealthy widow (age 29). Self-disciplined and reserved, she thrives on order. […]
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at the prison camp in Ekibastuz (Kazakhstan) Such is the fate of Russian books today: They bob up to the surface, if ever they do, plucked down to the skin. So it was recently with Bulgakov’s Master–its feathers floated over only later. So also with this novel of mine: In order to give […]
The statue of Švejk in HumennéŠvejk has been a faithful companion the past couple of months and I’m a little sad to shelve him (although maybe not for long since a family member seems interested in reading it). Despite its unevenness, I really enjoyed the book. To simply say this is an anti-war novel misses […]
Movie poster for Beg to Report, SirI am still working out where I want this blog to go, but one thing I wanted to do from the beginning was view/consume/compare a book to versions of it in other media, particularly film. I think I’ve made it clear I don’t have a problem with variations from […]
The major-general inspecting the latrines Illustration by Josef Lada Picture source “Stupid people have to exist too, because if everyone were wise then there would be so much good sense in the world that every other person would be driven crazy by it.” Most resources I’ve read mention that Hašek intended six volumes for The […]