Hints and tips:
...Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin, translated by Max Lawton NYRB Classics £16.99/$18.95, 336 pages Red Pyramid by Vladimir Sorokin, translated by Max Lawton NYRB Classics £16.99/$18.95, 288 pages Courtney...
...In Moscow, audiences have started going to the new Gogol Theatre, which has replaced Serebrennikov’s blacklisted centre. The venue’s last premiere sold out....
...Lilah RaptopoulosThe other opinion on this was that artists, especially dead artists, should not be held accountable for President Vladimir Putin’s war....
...While there are many books about President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, there are few that nail its realities with the same combination of academic precision, acerbic wit and anger as this....
...In an episode that would be hilarious if one read it in the works of Nikolai Gogol or Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, but is actually a grim illustration of Russia’s environmental sickness, officials in a Siberian...
...Lancôme-smeared teenage girls queue to snap selfies by billboards and audiences produce thunderous applause at sold-out performances of Chekhov, Gogol and Gorky....
...The letter has since been passed to Russian president Vladimir Putin. A local journalist overheard Mr Putin calling the police “idiots”....
...Was Maliavin nostalgically recalling rural Russia, or reposing Gogol’s question?...
...However, the best-known Russian writer in Berlin is Vladimir Sorokin, whose bizarre, dystopian novels satirise the repression of Putin’s Russia....
...Many influences and echoes from Russian literature can be detected in Teffi’s writing, the most obvious of which are Chekhov and Gogol....
...Last December, Vladimir Putin convened a “Literary Assembly” featuring descendants of Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy (whose great-great-grandson Vladimir is the Russian president’s cultural adviser)....
...Stalingrad was omitted from the foreign film category in the Oscars because it failed to mention the US role in the victory over the Nazis, said Vladimir Medinsky, Russian culture minister....
...On the ground, even the most diehard Russia supporters are being forced to reconcile their love for the motherland with unending bureaucratic miseries that seem plucked from the pages of Kafka or Gogol....
...So there is little mention of Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader, except one reference to the building of his house in Rehovot; two brief drive-bys past Vladimir Jabotinsky, the patriarch from whom the hard...
...The story that travels with him, which he will neither confirm nor deny, is that he is the confessor to Vladimir Putin....
...Vladimir Fedoseyev keeps the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra taut and together, and balances his often oddly matched forces deftly....
...The reach of Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime halts at the doors of this restaurant....
...But in August that year, in a twist worthy of a Gogol novel, the interior ministry investigators responsible for Magnitsky’s arrest opened a new case against the deceased lawyer – and Browder – for tax evasion...
...Rimsky-Korsakov May Night Vladimir Fedoseyev (Melodiya, 2CDs)...
...His star has risen in the past few years, as he has grown into one of the most outspoken opponents of Vladimir Putin, the prime minister....
...Paraphrasing Nikolai Gogol, the 19th-century satirist, he says the main problem with Sochi is “few roads, lots of idiots”. He fears the World Cup will be the same....
...It opened with a suite from The Nose, the composer’s other Gogol opera....
...Based on an 1836 short story by Nikolai Gogol, the opera tells an absurd tale of a St Petersburg bureaucrat whose nose disappears only to reappear later as a higher-ranking official who refuses to return...
...Inspired by the folksy whimsy of Gogol, it requires a cast of 70, a virtuoso conductor, a spiky orchestra and a theatrical apparatus that can clarify chaos....
...The Tsarina’s Slippers, we were told, had had to contend with a stereotype of Tchaikovsky as a tragic loner, more at home with love and death than with Gogol’s anarchic fantasy....
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