Russian literature
The Russian Proust
Yuri Felsen, born in St Petersburg, was an exile in Riga, Berlin and Paris and died at Auschwitz in 1943.…
The value of suffering
A death sentence, prison in Siberia, and chronic epilepsy. The death of his young children, a gambling addiction, and possible…
Futurist at a dead end
Why increase the number of suicides? Better to increase the output of ink! wrote Vladimir Mayakovsky in 1926 in response…
The tyrant and the cloud-dweller
The banning of Dr Zhivago in the Soviet Union had unfortunate consequences for other fine 20th-century Russian novels, says Robert Chandler
No place for sissies
The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a story for the older reader. One might go so far as to suggest…
