Tag Archives: USSR

‘Immaturity’ and ‘youth’ in poetry

I was amused (for reasons about to emerge) that the first hit I had for my last post, ‘Quetzalcoatl’, came from Mexico…but I was astonished that no-one wrote in to ask why on earth the poem was called ‘Quetzalcoatl’ and … Continue reading

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Short story: ‘My First Communist’

                                                                                … Continue reading

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War and woof poetry

Judging by allusions and quotations in his speeches, Volodymyr Zelensky either has a good knowledge of literature himself, or his team does. Unlike Putin, he speaks in a cultured manner, beautifully clearly and expressively, with a literary turn. In an … Continue reading

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‘The negation of everything worth living for’

In 2010, when the Putin Project was still just a monocracy and one could converse freely over the phone with friends in Russia, I remarked to one that Russia seemed to have ‘reached about 1892’, i.e. a point during the … Continue reading

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From the diary of a writer-publisher: 12

26 September Today I suddenly realised what life under Black Crow reminds me of: living in the Soviet Union. It would be unfair to compare Britain at the moment to the view from a window in Moscow University’s Stalinist hostel … Continue reading

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Inestimable Russianist 3: Harvey Pitcher

(This series is timed to coincide with the 2019 Annual Conference of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies at Robinson College, Cambridge.) Hale and hearty in his eighty-third year, Harvey Pitcher is not only one of this … Continue reading

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Russia (to be concluded)

My favourite Soviet dissident was Andrei Amal’rik (1938-80). He was short, he had suffered physically during two terms of exile in Siberia, but he was very squarely built and radiated resistance and survival. His black hair was cut in what … Continue reading

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Empires end like this…

There are two reasons that obtaining Permissions has taken so long, in my case at least (see 17 April and 20 April). First, although I rapidly earmarked the sixteen ‘major’ sources of quoted unpublished material in my biography, e.g. William Rothenstein, … Continue reading

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