The Slavic Literature Pod

Show Notes : This week, on For Your Consideration, Cameron dives into John Williams' 1960 novel, Butcher's Crossing , a cautionary tale about how reading Ralph Waldo Emerson can drive you into buffalo-murdering madness. It's not uncommon to see the novel compared to Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West , but after reading both...he's skeptical. I...

Show Notes : This week, Cameron dives into Frederick Wiseman’s 2002 film “The Last Letter,” a dramatization of one chapter of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate : the final letter Anna Semionova writes her son, Viktor Shtrum, from a Jewish ghetto. We’ll get into how Wiseman adapts this troubling, poignant chapter into film, why I think this chapter is the best encapsulation of Grossman’s ideas in Lif...

Show Notes : This week, you and Cameron get into some PREP WORK for an upcoming episode about Frederick Wiseman’s 2002 film “The Last Letter,” which dramatizes a chapter of Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate .  In preparation for that episode, we’ll read that dramatized chapter — Part 1, Chapter 18, Anna Semyonova’s final letter to her son, Viktor Shtrum — along with two other letters Grossman wrote...

Show Notes : This week, Dr. José Vergara returns to the podcast to talk about Sasha Sokolov’s A School for Fools . The novel, first published in English in 1977, follows student so-and-so (and his double) as he attempts to tell events of his life. The novel doesn’t follow a linear plot — or even an easy-to-distinguish narrator — and puts you on your toes as you meander between stories. Dr. Vergara...

Show Notes : This week, Cameron takes on the back half of Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur , covering chapters 25-43. As our characters finally arrive in the town of Chevengur, we go from a picaresque romp around the newly-Soviet countryside into the dirty work of actually building Communism.  “Danger and Deliverance: Reading Andrei Platonov” by Angela Livingstone “ Chevengur : On the Road with Bolshev...

Show Notes : This week, Cameron returns to the beginning of Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s Ukrainian Trilogy with “Zvenihora.” The film, released in 1928, explores a thousand years of Ukrainian history — spanning from Varangian invasion to the rise of the Soviet Union. The film is a fascinating take on Soviet film, mashing together Ukrainian culture and the new, Soviet reality. You may have noticed this ep...

Show Notes : This week, we see that every author starts somewhere in Anton Chekhov, Earliest Stories: Stories, Novellas, Humoresques, 1880-1882 . To talk about Chekhov’s earliest published stories, Cameron sits down with Elena Michajlowska and Rosamund Bartlett. The pair not only edited the collection, but also oversaw the unusual editing process that involved 83 other translators across the world...

Show Notes : This week, Cameron talks a little bit about director Sergei Parajanov’s “Sayat Nova” (also known as The Color of Pomegranates), and five other films he really liked this year.  Want to see the video version of this episode? Check it out here: https://youtu.be/khXaVt0ilFc Also, sorry, the name of the theater is Dreamland Cinema. I forgot to say that in the video.  An Analysis of the Co...

Show Notes : This week, Cameron dives into the final entry into Ukrainian director Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s Silent Trilogy, “Earth” (1930). The film’s deceptively simple plot—of a tractor delivery to a collectivizing village in Ukraine is followed by the murder of a local Bolshevik organizer—doesn’t hinder its avant-garde stylings, employing a montage of loose logical associations better described as...

Show Notes : This week, Ally Pitts — host of A Russian & Soviet Movie Podcast — joins Cameron to talk about the book Not Russian by Mikhail Shevelev. The book follows veteran journalist Pavel Vladimirovich as an old friend’s sudden reappearance at the head of a terror attack forces him to reflect on his history as a Russian journalist and how things turned out this way.  You can find Ally on h...

Show Notes : This week, Cameron dives into Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur , covering chapters 1 through 25. Through the late Russian Empire into the early Soviet Union, Sasha Dvanov is finally orphaned when his fisherman father drowns in an attempt to understand his all-knowing, deathless fish. Growing up in the shuffling shadow of the new world, he joins the Bolshevik party and seeks to spread commu...

Show Notes : This week, Cameron returns to Vasily Grossman, covering his first novel of World War II, The People Immortal . The novel follows the Red Army through the early days of the war: losing battles, ceding ever more ground, and quickly losing hope.  Although this novel doesn’t contain the philosophical and critical heights of his later two novels, The People Immortal yet captures Grossman’s...

Show Notes : This week, Cameron dives into Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic and Hai Fan’s Delicious Hunger , trying to probe the question plaguing recent episodes: “What is the value of art during wartime?” Deaf Republic tells an all-too-familiar parable of a town under occupation, subjected to abuse and murder, and how the people there chose their own forms of resistance to occupation.  Delicious Hu...

We were supposed to talk about Ilya Kaminsky's Deaf Republic and Fan Hai's Delicious Hunger today, but the episode's audio is trapped on a dead computer. You can look forward to listening to (a probably re-recorded) episode on Monday. Since we have the time, I wanted to take a step back and discuss the ever-evolving reason for this podcast. It's hard to talk about "just" li...

Show Notes : This week, Cameron continues speaking about Yevgenia Belorusets’ work with War Diary and also explores the experience of women living through war in Merce Rodoreda’s The Time of Doves .  War Diary catalogues the first 40 days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, capturing the turbulence and violence while never forgetting to focus on the human element. Belorusets’ writing is a...

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Show Notes : This week, Cameron talks about unreliable narrators in Yevgenia Belorusets’ Lucky Breaks and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried , posing an unusual argument: what if lying to your reader was a good thing? Belorusets is a Ukrainian writer whose work focuses on the people marginalized by society and takes that eye toward the East, writing stories of women from the Donbas region after...

Show Notes : This week, in For Your Consideration, Cameron dives into Belarusian writer Alhierd Bacharevič’s Alindarka’s Children and Laguna-Pueblo-American writer Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony . Both novels explore people native to a land that is now, in different ways, hostile to them.  Alindarka’s Children follows Avi and Sia’s fairy tale-like journey escaping a camp where they’re fed “vitamin...

Show Notes : This week, Cameron dives into William T. Vollmann’s Europe Central and Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood . The uniting theme this week: reflection and memory. Both novels cast a long shadow over his life, so it’s time to untangle exactly why that is.  Can Europe Central be cleanly read as a series of parables? Is it appropriate to turn Hitler into a sort-of fairy tale? Is it a red flag...

Show Notes : This week, Cameron dives solo into two books: Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me by Teffi and In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien. He’ll pull apart their authors’ mutual love for taking a creative license to their own lives. Major themes: Emotional truth, social expectations, Vietnam The interview with Tim O’Brien I read from. The documentary on My Lai I mentioned. Seymour Hersh’s...

Show Notes : Pick up a copy of The Story of Sonechka here. This week, Cameron dives into Marina Tsvetaeva’s The Story of Sonechka , a recollection of her relationship with the actress Sonia Holliday in Moscow, 1919. The story — one of the clearest examples of queer literature we’ve had on the podcast — reflects not only Marina and Sonia themselves, but also questions on relationships, memory and h...

A quick look forward to our June episodes plus a little apology for the delayed episode this month. If you'd like to join our monthly book club, you can join our discord here . Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Show Notes : This week, Cameron dives into Ukrainian writer Yuri Andrukhovych’s The Moscoviad , a picaresque-cum-magical realist novel following the poet Otto von F. as he spends one day trying to accomplish a few chores around Moscow: a visit to a meeting, a reunion with a sort-of girlfriend, and a gift for his friend’s children.  This journey takes him to beer halls, into the sewers, into the at...

Show Notes : This week, Cameron dives into the poetry of Vsevolod Nekrasov, joined by Bela Shayevich and Ainsley Morse who collected and translated works spanning much of his life in I Live I See: Selected Poems. Born in the USSR in 1934 and writing—mostly unofficially—through the end of his life in 2009 now in the Russian Federation, Vsevolod Nekrasov’s work is largely minimalist and deploys repe...

Show Notes : This week, Cameron ascends into the towering heights of imperial politics in Yaroslav Barsukov’s Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory by Yaroslav Barsukov. The novel follows Shea Ashcroft, an imperial minister whose refusal to gas protesting citizenry has earned him a reassignment to a border region to oversee a fantastical military project. With no one truly on his side and managing strang...