Manic Bookstore Cafe

UPDATE: Evan Gershkovich, with other American and Russian political prisoners, was freed on August 1. As someone posted somewhere, we can rejoice that our people are out and the Russians have received murderers and spies in return. The optics of Evan's (and Alsu's) rushed trials to make sure to convict before the trade deal went through are bad... but then, what is good out of Russia these days? Trying not to despair. This good news is something anyway. Just over five years ago, I found myself with ten days on my hands in Europe. I had taken a group of 20+ students to Hungary and Poland, and I was due to participate in a conference in Croatia. There was a window. Any normal person would head straight to the beaches of the Dalmatian Coast. Instead, I went to Rome, to John Cabot's Guarini Institute , where we held a panel on the topic of  30 years after 1989 ... and then I went to Russia.  Musing on the former Soviet Union and my time there as a student--especially after wat...

So this week President Vladimir Putin of Russia was quoted in the New York Times as complaining about "boorishness." Photo credit: Mauri Ratilainen/ European Pressphoto Agency for the NYT This was not the  most  noteworthy quote in the NYT this week (I am striving not to use profanity since reading about J.D. Vance's Mamaw in his  Hillbilly Elegy , so I won't repeat the other quote). It was, however, named the " Quotation of the Day ." Not many Americans use the word "boorishness." In fact, I may never have heard it spoken aloud in my entire life. Nonetheless, as often happens when reading translations, I had to back-translate and realized immediately what Putin must have said in Russian. I checked on the Russian internet, and I was right: Putin called the new sanctions being imposed on Russia by the U.S. Senate "boorishness and cynicism" -- or khamstvo i tsinizm . The word khamstvo , or boorishness, seems like the kind of t...

Seems like kismet that I am teaching Eugene Onegin  in the week that I was asked to review a newly translated novella by Eugenia Kononenko called A Russian Story (Glagoslav Publications, 2012). This novella strikes at the heart of Russian-Ukrainian relations and the complicated post-Soviet global lives of former Ukrainian citizens. Featuring a hero named "Eugene Samarsky" ("derived not from the Russian place-name Samara on the Volga, but from the name of a minor Ukrainian river, a tributary of the Dnipro," as he never tires of explaining), the book explores the travels and travails of the post-Soviet son of Ukraine as he inexorably and with a certain self-aware incredulity follows the path of Pushkin's hero: he inherits an country estate (or at least a house) from a distant uncle, meets sisters named Tatiana and Olga, accidentally kills Olga's fiance Vladimir and has to flee the country and wander through foreign lands... In the meantime, the narrator...