Search Results

“... think it was my grandmother that made me a writer,’ Petrushevskaya told the translator Bela Shayevich in the Paris Review last year. ‘You must have loved her very much,’ Shayevich replied. ‘I didn’t.’Petrushevskaya was born in 1938 in the Metropol Hotel, an Art Nouveau pile that became famous for ...”

“... Svetlana Alexievich​ won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015, but some people still don’t think her books are literature. In fact, they are collective oral histories, of similar genre, though completely different in tone, to those of Studs Terkel in the United States, whom she has probably never read. Her main influence as far as genre is concerned was the Belorussian writer Ales Adamovich, who in the 1970s (with Daniil Granin) collected the testimonies of wartime Leningrad survivors in Blokadnaia kniga, but that’s not very helpful in a Western context since nobody has heard of him ...”