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Rita Rait's story about the Chinese boy Van in the 1939 magazine “Chizh”
A story by the legendary translator and writer Rita Rait-Kovaleva (1898-1988), thanks to whom the Soviet reader became acquainted with many works by Kafka, Faulkner, Salinger, Poe and Vonnegut. Besides her translations, Rita Rait was the author of memoirs of the great writers who were her contemporaries, and
Books · Education · Humour
When the literary critic Desmond MacCarthy was invited to Cambridge in the 1920s to give public lectures, he devoted his course to Byron, which displeased the students: Byron had long gone out of fashion and was considered not worth discussing at…
MacCarthy was not prepared to change his subject and defended Byron in every way he could, but, seeing the audience's displeasure, he made a concession and invited anyone who wished to come to him in the evenings, after the lectures on Byron, for a conversation about talented young
Archive · Books · Ethnography
Please Meet Kozyavka
A story about a Jewish boy from a Crimean kolkhoz. Chizh magazine, issue 6, 1939. The boy, in case you were wondering, was called Elya. And Kozyavka is a small ginger cow.
Books · People · Saint Petersburg · Humour
Denis Davydov's verses of 1818 on his plans for the evening and a journey to Saint Petersburg
A Decisive Evening. This evening I shall see you, This evening my lot will be decided, This evening I shall receive what I desire, Or an abschied into retirement! And tomorrow, the devil take it, I shall get tight as a tick, I shall fly like an arrow in a
Archive · Books · Mores · Education
The Student and the Landlord's Daughter in 19th-Century Novels and the Risk to His Career
Students are forbidden to marry for the whole time of their residence at the university: so runs paragraph 17 of the section "Rules for Students of the University During the Course of Study" in the "Rules for Students and Non-Matriculated Auditors… If one takes this fact
Books · People · Humour
Chekhov on children who followed their father's advice but grew up unhappy
"Chew properly," Father used to say. And they chewed well, and walked for two hours a day, and washed in cold water, and all the same they turned out wretched, talentless people. Chekhov
NB! · Archive · Books
The First Version of the Title of *Pride and Prejudice*
Archive · Books · Society
Bourgeois civilisation has borne all its luxuriant fruits
Bourgeois civilisation has borne all its luxuriant fruits. America has taken first place among the free and educated countries in the level of development of the productive forces of united human labour, in the use of machinery and of all the wonders of modern technology. At the same time America
Books · New York · Society · People
Joseph Brodsky answers Kundera in defence of Dostoevsky in The New York Times Book Review
In 1968 Milan Kundera refused to stage Dostoevsky in the theatre, and seventeen years later wrote about it in the essay "Preface to a Variation", in which he speaks openly of his dislike of Dostoevsky and of the entry of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia. "I reread The
NB! · Books · Mores · People
Albert Camus and His Cat, Cigarette
Archive · Books
In every person there are several persons, and they all struggle against one another
In every person there are several persons, and they all struggle against one another. And it is not always the worthiest who prevails. But often life itself resolves what seemed most unresolvable of all. Alexander Blok, in a letter to Elena Tager, who had asked his advice about her poetic