Karl Schlögel’s Moscow recently appeared in English for the first time.
‘They are burning memory. They’ve been doing it for a long time . . . I go out of my mind when I think that every night thousands of people throw their diaries into the fire.’ The Soviet writer Yuri Tynianov said this to a colleague in Leningrad in the late 1930s. They were standing at a window looking at the air outside, which was filled with a fine ash. We...
The first two decades of the USSR saw what was then the fastest and largest instance of urban growth in human history. In just thirteen years, the population living in cities and towns more than doubled...
In post-Soviet Russia perfume was one of the luxury goods that symbolised the repudiation of Soviet puritanism. While Polina Zhemchuzhina’s attempt to bring perfume to the masses and rebrand it as socialist...
Over the last thirty years, Karl Schlögel has been the most distinguished flâneur among historians of Russia. A sense of place – both as the setting for human encounters and...
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