The Russians of today show no sign of pulling down the great statue of Peter the Great that overlooks the Neva. Nor do they show any signs of cancelling Pushkin.
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Pushkin and the Trauma of the Flood
Category: literature
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Strange Freedom
From this traumatised, divided old Russian Soviet poet, we learn about our own strange freedom.
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The Seminar and the Last Night
Shvarts has become for me an important poet.
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The Irony of Chekhov
Something tells me Chekhov and the innovations in drama he bequeathed to us may appear in my podcast series on the gifts of Russian culture.
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Republishing blogs as books
The focus of my writing attention over the last couple of weeks has been on editing a collection of my blog posts that I will publish as books.I don’t know how common it is to republish blogs as books, if in edited and curated form. It seems little different to me to the many collections of oped, short essays, book reviews and occasional pieces that do get published quite often.
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A relic of another time
The Russians with Attitude podcast released to their subscribers a feature this week on the Russian writer and mystic, Mikhail Bulgakov. Bulgakov made his way from a medical student in Kiev through the Civil War in Russia and Ukraine to a difficult life as a writer for newspapers, theatre and novels in the 1920s and 1930s. He wrote a great account of the Civil War in The White Guard, and of course the masterpiece for which he earned posthumous fame, The Master and Margarita. [Read more]….
Join the The Burning Archive Podcast on Apple or Spotify and other platforms for a special feature on the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature, and learn not only about the hushed excitement of the winner (sshh no spoilers), but the history of the prize, favourite winners, best losers, and most contentious scandals. Congratulations to Abdulrazak […]
Michael Oakeshott, Marina Tsvetaeva, Elena Shvarts, Russian Ark, St Petersburg
I have begun a YouTube channel, The Burning Archive, where I will feature short videos of my writing and interests in culture, history and literature. To begin the channel I am releasing a set of five poems that I have read from each of the fascicles of Gathering the Flowers of the Mind: Collected Poems, […]
I am very pleased to announced that I am publishing my collected poems, Gathering Flowers of the Mind: Collected Poems, 1996-2020 in both a print and e-book edition. You can purchase through online retailers such as Amazon and Booktopia. You can buy the print edition from Amazon here and the e-book edition from Amazon here. […]
This morning I read this poem. “A task” by Czelaw Milosz, chosen randomly from his collected poems. It reminded me of the post I made on reading this poem initially in 2017. It resonated again today amidst so much degraded public discourse. I will add to this repost the closing paragraph of the other poem […]
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The poet W as comedian
Wallace Stevens is a poet of comedy, and comedy relieves the distress of tragic history. Comedy reconciles the restless, Romantic imagination with the present and the real. When the world falls apart, one must cultivate one’s garden, but also tell some comic stories over dinner. It is comedy, not alone but inseparable, that moves the infinite conversation on.
The Burning Archive 