Keith Gessen

Keith Gessen is a founding editor of n+1 and teaches at Columbia Journalism School. He has written two novels, All the Sad Young Literary Men and A Terrible Country.

Cell Block Four: Khodorkovsky

Keith Gessen, 25 February 2010

In Moscow, the second trial of the former oil and banking tycoons Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev has now been going on for nearly a year. The trial itself, which is doggedly examining a series of esoteric and possibly imaginary economic crimes while skating over more serious – and also possibly imaginary – suggestions of violent criminality, has not been very interesting. The drama of two very bright men – one of whom, Khodorkovsky, is now a political figure of some significance – facing off against the entire apparatus of an authoritarian state, on the other hand, has been riveting. It was always bound to be.

Letter

Run on the Rouble

20 November 2008

Just before New Year, I went to the Sberbank and transferred my grandmother’s life savings out of roubles and into a new account denominated in dollars, as I threatened to do in my Diary (LRB, 20 November 2008). It took a while, because the Sberbank clerk wasn’t satisfied with the forms I brought authorising me to use the account: she kept calling someone at headquarters and saying, ‘I have someone...

Diary: Watching the Rouble Go Down

Keith Gessen, 20 November 2008

The financial crisis – or, as we like to call it here, ‘the effects of the American and European financial crisis on Russia’ – has taken a little while to get going, but it’s going now. Yesterday my grandmother sat me down for a serious conversation: she wanted to know if she should take her rouble-denominated life savings out of the Sberbank and put them into dollars. Everyone’s a financial adviser now. Or rather, I’m a financial adviser now. This is not good.

Alfred Kazin published his first and best book of literary criticism, On Native Grounds, in 1942, when he was 27 years old. It told, in highly wrought, dramatic prose, the story of American literature from what Kazin called ‘the opening struggle for realism’ in the 1890s to 1940. It was written over the course of four years but reads as if it had been done in white heat over six...

One​ of my parents’ favourite Soviet films is called Autumn Marathon. Its main character, an academic translator, is living a double life. Out of divided loyalties rather than greed or...

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Degoogled: Keith Gessen

Joanna Biggs, 22 May 2008

Sad young and literary in 1938 and you could at least prove yourself opposing Hitler, sad young and literary in 1968 and you could demonstrate in Grosvenor Square, but what if you had the...

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