Russian book club

[Cypress]

It basically has everything I like - a dystopian, apocalyptic future, survival horror, the Mad Max of the underground.

Metro 2034 (The sequel to Metro 2033)
by Dmitry Glukhovsky

Overview
The long-awaited sequel to the cult bestseller Metro 2033, the second volume in the Metro trilogy, Metro 2034 continues the story of survival and struggle that unfolds in the mazes of the Moscow subway after WWIII.

As the entire civilization was wiped out by atomic bombs and the surface of the planet is polluted with neclear fallout, the only place suitable for men to live are shelters and bunkers, the largest of which is the subway system of Moscow, aka the Metro.

The Metro Series is set following a nuclear war in the early 21st century. The remnants of humanity now live underground in the Moscow subway system. Like the city-states of ancient Greece, individual stations govern themselves sometimes banding together to form small nations. Their ideologies vary from adherence to the Koran to fascism to nonspecific mysticism to communism. They war among each other, and with the mutant beings which have risen from ashes of the old world.

Metro 2034 takes place roughly a year after the events of Metro 2033. For better or worse, the “threat” of the dark ones has been eliminated. Those who remain must live with the decisions they made and that is not necessarily easy to do.

There's no hope for humans to return to the surface of Earth, to repopulate the forsaken cities, and to become once again the masters of the world they used to be. So they rebuild a strange and grotesque civilization in the tunnels and at the stations of the subway. Stations become city-states that wage trade and war on each other. A fragile equilibrium is established.

And then all can be ruined in matter of days. A new horrible threat looms that can eradicate the remains of humanity and end our era. It would take three unlikely heroes to face this menace.

The basis of two bestselling computer games Metro 2033 and Metro Last Light, the Metro books have put Dmitry Glukhovsky in the vanguard of Russian speculative fiction.

Metro 2034 tells a previously unknown part of the greater Metro saga that some only know from video games. Featuring blistering action, vivid and tough characters, claustrophobic tension and dark satire the Metro books have become bestsellers across the world.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/metro-2034-dmitry-glukhovsky/1118588634
https://horrornovelreviews.com/2016/01/11/dmitry-glukhovsky-metro-2034-review/

 

[Cypress]

This I recently reserved at the library.

Life and Fate
Vasily Semyonovich Grossman

A book judged so dangerous in the Soviet Union that not only the manuscript but the ribbons on which it had been typed were confiscated by the state, Life and Fate is an epic tale of World War II and a profound reckoning with the dark forces that dominated the twentieth century. Interweaving an account of the battle of Stalingrad with the story of a single middle-class family, the Shaposhnikovs, scattered by fortune from Germany to Siberia, Vasily Grossman fashions an immense, intricately detailed tapestry depicting a time of almost unimaginable horror and even stranger hope. Life and Fate juxtaposes bedrooms and snipers' nests, scientific laboratories and the Gulag, taking us deep into the hearts and minds of characters ranging from a boy on his way to the gas chambers to Hitler and Stalin themselves. This novel of unsparing realism and visionary moral intensity is one of the supreme achievements of modern Russian literature (New York Review Books classics. summary).

Grossman’s 'Life and Fate' took me three weeks to read – and three to recover

There are novels I have re-read after 30 or 40 years that have shocked me with ideas which evidently made such a strong impression they ceased to be someone else’s thoughts and became my own. After a lifetime of reading you become formed by books; you are partly an accumulation of others’ ideas. Every time I re-read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway I see how this brief but enormously influential novel, first read in my teens, created in me the sense of lightness and excitement when walking down a London street, or how the phrase “among the cabbages” would resonate as a fragment of a sentence about memory and longing.

But only one book had such a decisive impact that I can date to it a profound alteration in my worldview and even behaviour. I read Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate in 2003. Like a handful of other people a decade ago, I felt that I held a samizdat; no one else I knew had ever heard of it.

Like many of my generation, I’d been shaped by ideas; by a number of -isms, socialism and feminism above all. I saw the world in terms of various us and them groupings. After reading Life and Fate they seemed to matter less. Grossman wasn’t advocating Christian saintliness, and was far from perfect in his own life. But if, even in the horror of war, you can alleviate suffering through some extraordinary action (volunteering to go to the gas chamber to hold the hand of a child so he won’t have to die alone), how easy might it be to behave with less anger, cynicism, irritation or sneery dismissiveness? And that’s what I have tried to do. Life and Fate is a daunting undertaking, but for those who finish it the experience is profound. Few novels that set out to change the world succeed; this one merely changed me.

continued https://www.theguardian.com/comment...k-that-changed-me-linda-grant-vasily-grossman

 

[Cypress]

I thoroughly enjoyed the "Metro" series by this author, and was also interested to find out he is a dedicated Russian liberal activist bent on sticking it to Putin. Always worth it to hear from actual Russians who have lived their whole lives in Russia, rather than message board arm chair experts.

Here is a pretty powerful indictment of American conservatives' favorite world leader: Vladimir Putin. There are actually a lot of parallels with Trumpism...

Interview: Dmitry Glukhovsky on the ‘Dubious Reality’ of Putin’s Russia

In today’s Russia, ‘one single government-corporation rules and owns the country,’ says Dmitry Glukhovsky, whose new novel ‘Text’ has sold into 14 languages and/or territories to date.

For better or worse, Glukhovsky shows no fear in addressing the Kremlin and, as he puts it, “the ever-rotting, pretentious, cynical, and proudly immoral caste of Russian rulers.

“I believe that we live in truly wonderful times,” Glukhovsky tells us, “wonderful” for the writers willing to see what he defines as “an epoch of not only post-truth but also post-ethic.” It’s a time in which societies, he says, “are re-enacting the biggest traumas of the last century. Dictatorships. Cold War. Fascism.

“These are really the times when all a writer needs to do is sit down and focus carefully on the dubious reality unfolding around him. What’s the point of writing a dystopian fiction nowadays,” he asks, “when the reality is exceeding your wildest fantasies?

“The ruling class” of the Putin era, he says, “is losing touch with the reality. This process is going faster and faster, to the complete amazement of the public. The people deserve something bigger than just propaganda news stories on Russian. “Text speaks not only of the total corruption of Russian law-enforcement, but also of the arrival of a two-caste system within the Russian society. There’s a caste of people who are ‘the system’ or who serve it: officials, police and special services, the MPs—but also propaganda journalists, organized crime kingpins, and even church leadership. In Putin’s Russia, all of these institutions are just departments of one single government-corporation that rules and owns the country.

“Other, simpler people are like serfs in the old times. Let alone privileges, these ‘serfs’ don’t have any guarantees of such basic human rights as freedom, property, or even life.

“The most interesting part of that phenomenon is, however, that the higher caste now wants to free itself of all moral restrictions. Wants to be free of ethics. It exists in a system of coordinates, in which there’s no good and no evil, no justice or injustice, no right and no wrong. Only strength and weakness are the opposing sides of this system, and the only value is your corporate loyalty.”

https://publishingperspectives.com/...t-rights-russia-politics-frankfurt-book-fair/

 

[Cypress]

A strange, but weirdly poignant and beautiful body of poetry that gives of a whiff of tragedy, feminism, and melancholy. The backdrop of Stalinist persecution, tragedy, art, and creation makes, for me, a riveting tale.

“You will hear thunder and remember me,
And think: she wanted storms. The rim
Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson,
And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.”

Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova was one of the most significant Russian poets of the 20th century. She was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in 1965 and received second-most nominations for the award the following year

Persecuted by the Stalinist government, prevented from publishing, regarded as a dangerous enemy , but at the same time so popular on the basis of her early poetry that even Stalin would not risk attacking her directly, Akhmatova's life was hard. Her greatest poem, "Requiem," recounts the suffering of the Russian people under Stalinism -- specifically, the tribulations of those women with whom Akhmatova stood in line outside the prison walls, women who like her waited patiently, but with a sense of great grief and powerlessness, for the chance to send a loaf of bread or a small message to their husbands, sons, lovers. It was not published in in Russia in its entirety until 1987, though the poem itself was begun about the time of her son's arrest. It was his arrest and imprisonment, and the later arrest of her husband Punin, that provided the occasion for the specific content of the poem, which is sequence of lyric poems about imprisonment and its affect on those whose loveed ones are arrested, sentenced, and incarcerated behing prison walls..

The poet was awarded and honorary doctorate by Oxford University in 1965. Akhmatova died in 1966 in Leningrad.

https://www.uvm.edu/~sgutman/Akhmatova.htm

 

[Cypress]

Dovlatov - a Netflix film
"Over six days in 1971, brilliant writer Sergei Dovlatov encounters maddening barriers to publishing his work under the repressive Soviet regime/"

“If Hemingway is to believed, poverty is an invaluable school for a writer. Poverty makes a man clear-sighted. And so on. It's interesting that Hemingway realized this only when he became rich.” - Sergei Dovlatov

 

[EddieSdroli]

I am looking for a book on the Sumerian civilization as translated from the tablets found. Not so much in story form, more like just the translations. Does a book like that exist? I just picked up the Epic of Gilgamesh because thats all they had no-corporate-stores-here lol. I am all for ordering here or somewhere else. i want to know about their way of life and their belief system as translated from the tabs.

Thanks in advance

ps- book on tape/audio book would be awesome

 

[Cypress]

“I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances — from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death.” - Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

The Gulag Archipelago (Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, 1973)
I dedicate this
to all those who did not live
to tell it.
And may they please forgive me
for not having seen it all
nor remembered it all,
for not having divined all of it.
(Dedication)

“For years, I have with a reluctant heart withheld from publication this already completed book: my obligation to those still living outweighed my obligation to the dead. But now that State Security has seized the book anyway, I have no alternative but to publish it immediately.”
(Author's Note, Gulag Archipelago)

 

[evince]

This is on my nightstand, and next on deck for me to read.


Solzhenitsyn's One Day: The book that shook the USSR

In the madness of World War II, a dutiful Russian soldier is wrongfully convicted of treason and sentenced to ten years in a Siberian labor camp. So begins this masterpiece of modern Russian fiction, a harrowing account of a man who has conceded to all things evil with dignity and strength.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's classic novel, was published 50 years ago this month. A short, simply-told tale about a prisoner trying to survive the Gulag - the Soviet labour camp system - it is now regarded as one of the most significant books of the 20th Century. Illuminating a dark chapter in Russian history, it is at once a graphic picture of work camp life and a moving tribute to man’s will to prevail over relentless dehumanization.

"It was still dark, although a greenish light was brightening in the east. A thin, treacherous breeze was creeping in from the same direction. There is no worse moment than when you turn out for work parade in the morning. In the dark, in the freezing cold, with a hungry belly, and the whole day ahead of you. You lose the power of speech..."


https://www.amazon.com/One-Day-Life-Ivan-Denisovich/dp/0451531043
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20393894

its a darkly beautiful tale

 

[Cypress]

its a darkly beautiful tale

Day in the Life was a compelling read, and it is great to run across someone else who actually read it.

To me, the thing that is so striking, so arresting about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is his fierce integrity. He always said that spending time in the Gulag forced him to clarify and distill his priorities and ethical values. He claimed he was prepared for imprisonment, and even death, in order to play his role in advancing the truth. And he put his money where his mouth is, so his claims are not empty rhetoric.

 

[evince]

he was truly a beautiful human being


I was him for a short while


It helped from me intellectually


It was actually more intense then just reading it


acting can be like that if you immerse your self truly

 

[Cypress]

he was truly a beautiful human being

I was him for a short while

It helped from me intellectually

It was actually more intense then just reading it

acting can be like that if you immerse your self truly

My father once interviewed Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, and Solzhenitsyn once asked to meet with my cousin’s husband. The impression I got from these family stories is that Solzhenitsyn was a complicated individual – a person of fierce integrity, a philosopher of the highest order, but a person who defies all attempts to place him into a box, ideology, or persuasion. Ruthlessly anti-communist, he nonetheless found capitalism almost equally morally depraved and spiritually bankrupt. Solzhenitsyn in some ways is almost a reactionary, a Russian mystic who pines for ideal of Eastern Orthodoxy, spiritual purity, and mysticism. Westerners who thought they could leverage Solzhenitsyn as a pawn, a pro-western mouth piece in their ideological war with the Kremlin were sorely disappointed. Solzehnitsyn is a traditional Russian nationalist, ethical philosopher, and Eastern Orthodox spiritualist in a way that garden-variety westerners can never understand. Your brush with A Day in the Life, gave you insights into the human condition most Americans do not have, in my opinion.

In this interview, Solzhenitsyn provides the opinion that Capitalism and selfishness – aided and abetted by Protestantism, ultimately leads to spiritual and moral degradation....an interesting take on things>>>

An Interview with Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Pearce: A British journalist recently stated that you believe that Russia has overthrown the evils of communism only to replace them with the evils of capitalism, is that a fair statement of your position and, if so, what do you feel are the worst evils of capitalism?

Solzhenitsyn: Communist propaganda would sometimes include statements such as "we include almost all the commandments of the Gospel in our ideology". The difference is that the Gospel asks all this to be achieved through love, through self-limitation, but socialism only uses coercion. This is one point. Untouched by the breath of God, unrestricted by human conscience, both capitalism and socialism are repulsive.

Pearce: Does the fact that modernity makes a virtue out of selfishness constitute one of the keys to its (capitalism’s) enduring success?

Solzhenitsyn: That's very correct. It does make a virtue out of selfishness and Protestantism made a major contribution to this.

Pearce: Why Protestantism?

Solzhenitsyn: Of course, one cannot declare that only my faith is correct and all other faiths are not. Of course God is endlessly multi-dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God. One must not have any negative attitude to any religion but nonetheless the depth of understanding God and the depth of applying God's commandments is different in different religions. In this sense we have to admit that Protestantism has brought everything down only to faith.

Calvinism says that nothing depends on man, that faith is already predetermined. Also in its sharp protest against Catholicism, Protestantism rushed to discard together with ritual all the mysterious, the mythical and mystical aspects of the Faith. In that sense it has impoverished religion.



https://www.catholiceducation.org/en/culture/art/an-interview-with-alexander-solzhenitsyn.html

 

[Cypress]

Circling back to finish reading Gogol’s “Dead Souls”. Thank you, socialist public library!

Apparently, Gogol has become part of the asymmetric political and national rivalry between Russia and Ukraine. Weaponized literature. The cultural and historical milieu that was transmitted to me by family narrative was of a greater East Slavic federation of Great Russians, White Russians, and Little Russians. Whatever differences there were supposedly outweighed by East Slavic solidarity. That narrative may have been a manifestation of Russian conceit, because the reality of fierce nationalism and grievance is obviously real and palpable.

- Russia and Ukraine renew rivalry over Nikolai Gogol -
On 200th anniversary of literary giant Nikolai Gogol's birth, both countries lay claim to writer

First, it was politics, then it was gas. Now the protracted antagonism between Russia and Ukraine is taking on a literary tinge, as the bickering neighbours vie for the legacy of Nikolai Gogol on the 200th anniversary of his birth.

Gogol is best known for scathing satirical masterpieces about Russian society such as Dead Souls and The Nose, but he also wrote intimately about his experience of Ukrainian customs in works such as Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka.

The writer was born and spent his youth in rural Ukraine - then part of the tsarist Russian empire - in the early 19th century, but wrote in Russian, lived some of his life in St Petersburg and was buried in Moscow. His nationality is the subject of intense public debate as the bicentenary approaches, with both states funding events to mark the occasion.

Aleksey Vertinsky, an actor at Kiev's academic youth theatre, told the Ukrainian press he was disgusted at Russian attempts to "adopt" Gogol. "They can get lost," he said. "If I announce this morning that I'm a blue trolleybus, does it mean I should drive off to the depot?" he added, in an absurdist afterthought that might have appealed to the writer himself.

But many experts in Moscow argue Gogol is "100% Russian". "A part of the political elite in Kiev wants to claim Gogol as their own so they can enter civilised Europe with at least one great Ukrainian writer," said Igor Zolotussky, a Russian authority on Gogol.

"But there can be no such discussion because there is no such thing as a separate Ukrainian national identity. Gogol wrote and thought in Russian. He was a great Russian writer, full stop."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/mar/31/nikolai-gogol-russia-ukraine

 

[Cypress]

Dostoyevsky's Notes From the Underground >>

My brief summary and take-aways :

Would you cast yourself out of paradise and into a state of abject misery in order to be free?

Would you work against your own economic and social best interest in order to cling to the elixir of free will?

 

[Cypress]

Here is what I did not know about Vladimir Mayakovsky, who at one time I thought was a stooge for the Bolsheviks.

He started out as a starry-eyed dreamer, confident that the Soviet system was ushering in an era of a Communist utopia.

By the late 1920s, he became obviously disgusted with the scale of lying and sycophancy in the regime. Rather than the new communist utopia he had naively imagined, he had lived to see a totalitarian Soviet communist system that would lead to the imprisonment of the human spirit. And his plays of the time reflected that sentiment and were therefore dangerous to even perform in a public theater.

The Bad Boy of Russian Poetry

When Vladimir Mayakovsky committed suicide on April 14, 1930, the news sent shock waves through the Soviet Union. Ilya Ehrenburg, who knew of Mayakovsky’s notorious gambling habit, thought he might have been playing Russian roulette with his beloved Mauser pistol and lost his bet. But Mayakovsky’s suicide note, written two days before his death, suggested otherwise. Asking his mother and sisters to forgive him and sardonically asking for there to be no gossip (“the deceased hated gossip”).

At the time of his death he was simultaneously involved with three different women: his longtime mistress, Lili Brik, with whom he had spent most of his adult life in a bohemian ménage à trois (together with her husband, Osip Brik), but who was just then involved with a movie director; Tatyana Yakovleva, a striking young White Russian whom Mayakovsky had met in Paris and asked to marry him, but who had just married a Frenchman instead; and Veronika Polonskaya, a sultry young stage actress, also married, to whom he had also proposed marriage. Emotionally he was a wreck, and his death might have been precipitated by his relations with any one of his paramours.

But that wasn’t the only mystery. In the tightly controlled Soviet Union, suicide was seen as a crime and an act of defiance, an assertion of personal freedom that contradicted the image of the state as a workers’ paradise.

Why would someone as famous and popular as Mayakovsky have killed himself, even under provocation? What most of his readers didn’t know was that for the first time since the October Revolution, Mayakovsky was seriously disaffected. Stalin had started to purge his regime of “Trotskyists” and other perceived enemies, and two recent satirical plays of Mayakovsky, The Bedbug and The Bathhouse, had aroused official anger with their frank criticisms of government leaders and corrupt bureaucrats. His enemies whispered that he, too, was a secret Trotskyist and an elitist, out of touch with his proletarian base.

He was already being shadowed by the OGPU (the secret police), and its agents swarmed through his apartment the moment his death became known. They had long since penetrated Mayakovsky’s inner circle. Osip Brik had been an agent of the secret police in the early 1920s and he and Lili still maintained close contact with them; and the official death notice and the official death notice was signed by no fewer than three secret agents, in addition to a couple of Mayakovsky’s literary allies.

<continued>
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/09/24/mayakovsky-bad-boy-russian-poetry/

 

[Cypress]

Put this on my library reading list - My grandmother was from a Don Cossack family, and I cannot believe I have waited this long to read Sholokhov.

"And Quiet Flows the Don"
By Mikhail Sholokhov

"An extraordinary Russian masterpiece, And Quiet Flows the Don follows the turbulent fortunes of the Cossack people through peace, war and revolution - among them the proud and rebellious Gregor Melekhov, who struggles to be with the woman he loves as his country is torn apart. Borne of Mikhail Sholokhov's own early life in the lands of the Cossacks by the river Don, it is a searing portrait of a nation swept up in conflict, with all the tragic choices it brings." — Penguin Books synopsis

Mikhail Sholokhov’s groundbreaking epic novel gives a sweeping depiction of Russian life and culture in the early 20th century. In the same vein as War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy, And Quiet Flows the Don gives readers a glimpse into many aspects of Russian culture, and the choices a country makes when faced with war and destruction. In his enormous epic of Cossack life during the Revolution…Mikhail Sholokhov has achieved even greater power, sustained narrative gift and stirring human truthfulness.” —New York Times

“In addition to its panoramic grandeur, the wealth of its characters and its historic realism, Sholokhov’s book is memorable for its portrayal of the primitive and already almost legendary life of the Don Cossacks.”
—Malcolm Cowley, New Republic

 

[Cypress]

This is one I just started. I am amazed Zoshchenko managed to get away with writing satire and social criticism of life during the Stalinist regime. His method apparently was to camouflage his satire and criticism within cleverly constructed prose and metaphor. That took no small amount of courage, because getting on the wrong side of Stalin could earn one a one-way ticket to the Gulag.

Nervous People and Other Satires
by Mikhail Zoshchenko

Typical targets of Zoshchenko's satire are the Soviet bureaucracy, crowded conditions in communal apartments, marital infidelities and the rapid turnover in marriage partners, and "the petty-bourgeois mode of life, with its adulterous episodes, lying, and similar nonsense." His devices are farcical complications, satiric understatement, humorous anachronisms, and an ironic contrast between high-flown sentiments and the down-to-earth reality of mercenary instincts.

Zoshchenko's sharp and original satire offers a marvelous window on Russian life in the 20s and 30s.


source credit - GoodReads summary

 

[Cypress]

This is one I just started. I am amazed Zoshchenko managed to get away with writing satire and social criticism of life during the Stalinist regime. His method apparently was to camouflage his satire and criticism within cleverly constructed prose and metaphor. That took no small amount of courage, because getting on the wrong side of Stalin could earn one a one-way ticket to the Gulag.

This clever little satire by Zoshchenko caught my eye. In a few short sentences, he eviscerates the inefficiency of the Soviet economic system and how it manifested as comic discord in people's everyday lives. It is hard to believe he got things like this past the censors in Stalin's Soviet Russia, but I suppose his satire was camouflaged and two degrees removed from him personally, enough to offer him plausible deniability.

A Clever Little Trick, by Mikhail Zoshchenko

I don't know how it is in Moscow, but here in Leningrad they sell only powerful electric light bulbs. Something like one hundred and fifty, two hundred, or four hundred candle power.

And as for consumers who dream of obtaining a light bulb of ten or maybe fifteen candle power, theirs prove to be truly senseless dreams. Such light bulbs are not for sale.

Well, I thought, they send these small bulbs to the provinces for use in the villages. And that calmed me down.

Now my old bulbs had burned out. I got three new ones of four hundred candle power each and basked in this bright light. Of course, it's annoying. It's very bright. The main thing is, I'm not a draftsman. It's so ridiculously bright in the hall and the bathroom that you just start to feel bad. But I stood it.

But this month the meter reader came. Started to check how much electricity I had burned up.

"Oho!" he says. "Your bill gets higher every month. What are you doing, frying potatoes in the electricity?"

I say, "No, I've got powerful bulbs. And I just don't know what to do. It's a hopeless situation."

Well, I got to talking with the meter reader. A lot of chit-chat. He had a glass of tea with me. Ate a roll. And then he says, "You know why there aren't any small bulbs? Shall I tell you?"

I say, "Tell me, but it'll hardly make me feel any better."

He says, "There's a big trick being played with the small bulbs. The whole thing has to do with the financial-industrial plan."

"I'm afraid I don't quite get you," I said.

He says, "The factory had to fulfill its plan. Well, so they went and fulfilled it."

"No," I say, "Ever since so much light has been beating down on me in this apartment, my bean doesn't work so well. I don't understand you."

"What is there," he says, "to understand? Well let's suppose that according to the plan they had to fulfill a production quota of a million candle power. Well, now just imagine-- are they going to start producing this million in small bulbs? They wouldn't make it in two years, the devils. So they decided to get there with big bulbs. Whether you make small bulbs or big ones, the work is the same. But you don't need nearly so many. And so, those devils have settled on big bulbs. They're turning them out like pancakes."

I said, "But that's a filthy trick! And also it's no joy to us that the government is wasting a lot of valuable electric power. Take me-- I have four hundred candle power in the toilet. I really feel guilty about going in there."

He said, "Be grateful that they didn't settle on the biggest bulbs of all. Next year they'll probably start turning out bulbs with a thousand candle power."

At this point I suddenly got mad.

"Instead of shooting off your mouth to me," I said, "you should tell me where I can get some small bulbs."

He said, "Even though I work for the electric service, I haven't laid eyes on any small bulbs for two years now."

With these words he said good-bye and departed. And I turned off the lights in the room, lay down on the bed, and in the darkness started thinking about what tricks people resort to in order to balance their office accounts.

 

[Cypress]

Putin is "an aspiring thug" who runs a mafia state

Bad-mouthing and maligning of Russia and Russians overlooks the fact that there are Russians who are willing to risk their jobs, even risk going to prison, rather than submit to Vladimir Putin.

That kind of courage is completely lacking in the American Republican Party, whom meekly submitted to Putin without firing a shot.

Masha Gessen is a Russian-American author, and activist who has been an outspoken critic of the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin and the President of the United States, Donald Trump.

In an extensive October 2008 profile of Vladimir Putin for Vanity Fair, Gessen reported that the young Putin had been "an aspiring thug" and that "the backward evolution of Russia began" within days of his inauguration in 2000.

Gessen was dismissed from her position as the chief editor of Russia's oldest magazine, Vokrug sveta, a popular-science journal, in September 2012 after she refused to send a reporter to cover a Russian Geographical Society event about nature conservation featuring President Putin because she considered it political exploitation of environmental concerns.


Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen on Putin and Trump

PBS interview with Masha Green: “Putin runs a mafia state. There’s no such thing in Russia as a national interest that is distinct from Putin’s personal accrual of power and money. It’s different from any kind of dictatorship or tyranny. A mafia state is a distinct phenomenon. And we have Trump, who I think would have a mafia state if he could get away with it, and that’s certainly what he has been trying to build.”


Sources
wikipedia
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-an...n-journalist-masha-gessen-on-putin-and-trump/

 

[Cypress]

homage to kin sent to the Vorkuta camps.

"Each of our lives is a Shakespearean drama raised to the thousandth degree. Mute separations, mute black, bloody events in every family. Invisible mourning worn by mothers and wives. Now the arrested are returning, and two Russias stare each other in the eyes: the ones that put them in prison and the ones who were put in prison. A new epoch has begun. You and I will wait for it together."

- Anna Akhmatova, 1956

 

[Cypress]

"I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances — from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Says West Is Failing as Model for World
"Untouched by the breath of God, unrestricted by human conscience, both capitalism and socialism are repulsive." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"Should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society in its present state as an ideal for the transformation of ours." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn



Exiled Soviet author Alexander Solzhenitsyn yesterday denounced western society, which he said has taken on a terrible similarity to the state-controlled societies of the communist world in its suffocation of spiritual life.

In a bleak and powerful speech at Harvard University's commencement, Solzhenitsyn said "our spiritual life" has been lost in both the West and the East, and he called for a "spiritual upsurge."

The Nobel Prize laureate came to Harvard from his seclusion in Vermont to deliver his first major speech in three years.

He titled his speech "A World Split Apart," but it could as well have been called "The Decline of the West."

After prefacing his address by saying "Truth seldom is pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter . . . but I want to stress that [my speech] comes not from an adversary, but from a friend," Solzhenitysn launched a long, scathing attack on western society as morally bankrupt.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/arch...r-world/69e9fb6c-60d6-41f3-9022-606631a60e35/