Manic Bookstore Cafe

What to do on a holiday weekend in the U.S. if you don't care about football? My answer is to look through my bookshelves to see what I've acquired and not gotten around to reading. Friday I discovered The Free World  by David Bezmozgis and dug right in. Published in 2011, this book fits into the genre of origin stories for Soviet emigres ... how my family and I ended up in the Free World and what it meant for us. If you haven't heard of Bezmozgis, you should have. First of all, he was one of The New Yorker 's 20 under 40 in 2010. (Not sure how that feels to him 6 years later...) Secondly, what a great name -- the "is" at the end tells you he is originally from Latvia (not everyone knows that suffix game you can play with Soviet emigre surnames) but the "bez mozg" part is particularly fun for anyone who has studied Russian. "Bez" means "without" and "mozg" is brains. Another strike against him, perhaps, that his ...

About a month ago I saw a Moscow theater production , projected on a screen in suburban Cincinnati. It was breathtaking -- the scope and creativity of the theatrical version of Pushkin's classic novel-in-verse from 1831 had me rapt. Then I went to Moscow. The Moscow theater scene is all about the classics these days. There's a new musical based on Tolstoy's Anna Karenina ; the Vakhtangov is showing that Eugene Onegin , and Chekhov's plays never leave the repertoire: Uncle Vanya , Three Sisters , Cherry Orchard  etc. I was in town all of two evenings, but that didn't stop me. I got to two productions based on classic 19th century fiction, and both were utterly amazing. Opening Scene of R.R.R., featuring Raskolnikov on the typewriter At the Mossovet Theater I attended R. R. R. , a play based on Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.  Porfiry Petrovich shows Raskolnikov his article, published under the pseudonym "R.R.R." -- Rodion Romanovich...

Wednesday evening I had a rather surreal experience. I went to see Rimas Tuminas's brilliant play of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin , staged at the Vakhtangov Theatre in Moscow. But it was one of those filmed plays that American movie theaters have taken to showing (I wrote about a National Theatre Live production here ). Which is great. I was thrilled to see it -- I'm going to Russia in a few weeks, but I won't manage to get to the theater, and theatrical offerings where I live are not on this level. I've heard a lot about Tuminas, but since I haven't really been in Moscow much in years, I've never seen one of his productions. And it was terrific. Tuminas takes the classic Russian novel-in-verse, the centerpiece, really, of much of Russian literature, and turns it into a compelling spectacle. Tchaikovsky's opera of  Eugene Onegin  is well-known, of course, and there have been numerous attempts to render the novel in film, but this staged version is the ...

It's back to school season in the U.S. Elementary and high school students in my part of the country have been in the classroom for a month now, and most colleges have started their fall term as well. But in the late summer I began encouraging people to ask me when I head back to the classroom -- because the answer is so satisfying. "August, 2017," I say. Sabbaticals are a perk of academic life, and a real treat. The idea is two-fold. Originally, I imagine, a sabbatical was granted in order that faculty members would have a chance to relax and recharge. The wording is not accidental. At most institutions, faculty are eligible for sabbaticals every seven years, which someone must have decided was the stretch of time after which renewal was required. We do work hard (though perhaps not harder than other people!), and especially when a professor has been teaching the same courses term after term, a chance to step away from the classroom, to read up on new developments...

A few semesters ago, I had a student in my lit class. Call him Paul. Nice guy, somewhat engaged with the material, often enthusiastic about lectures and even class discussions, though when I asked a specific question, it usually turned out that he hadn't quite finished doing his reading for class. After twenty years of teaching, I don't remember all my students. But Paul sticks in my mind for a couple of reasons. First, he was just the kind of student I like to get in my general education classes -- a student who won't go on to major in literature or even the humanities necessarily, but who seems to enjoy being exposed to Russian literature. He learned something, and his world got a little bigger. That's what general education is all about. But there's another reason I remember Paul. It turned out that for him, the subject matter wasn't entirely new. Towards the end of the semester he told me: "I really love listening to you talk about Russia and R...

My students and I are working on a large translation project. We want to explore Petr Vail and Alexander Genis's 1987  Russian Cuisine in Exile  and try to bring it to an English-speaking audience. This is harder than you might think. I've taught sections of the book and written about it  before , but this time we are translating selected essays into English. The introduction already defies naming. Currently we are calling it "Expressions of the Soul," but the literal translation would be "Beautiful Gusts of the Soul." You see the problem. (Perhaps the title is playing on blagorodnye poryvy , noble impulses? Comments are welcome!) The book is typically Russian, in that it has many layers and is built on literary and cultural allusions. For example, at one point the authors begin to reminisce about what were frankly impoverished culinary conditions -- the kinds of things they bought at their university cafeteria: "36 kopek studen' [a kind of ...