One-half of The Slavic Literature Pod duo. Old man by nature, killjoy by trade. I read trashy sci-fi and noir novels on the side.
Jake Zawlacki joins the podcast to talk about his translation of Akhmet Baitursynov's 1911 poetry collection Mosquito, a political tract that contains his hopes and fears for the Kazakh people and a yet-to-exist state.
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A novel about the Great Terror written during the Great Terror, Lydia Chukovskaya's Sofia Petrovna lives a fairly comfortable Soviet life – until her son is arrested for an unspecified crime.
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Pride Month is over; celebrating Pride is not. An affirmation of one of this podcast's core beliefs.
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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.
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Cameron covers some necessary background information for an upcoming episode about Frederick Wiseman’s 2002 film “The Last Letter,” which dramatizes a chapter of Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate.
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Dr. José Vergara Vergara returns to the podcast to break down Sasha Sokolov's first novel, A School for Fools.
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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.
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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.
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This week, Cameron dives into Vasily Grossman's first book of World War II: The People Immortal. Learn about how his writing evolved before writing his own "immortal" books, Stalingrad and LIfe and Fate
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Every author starts somewhere. To talk about Chekhov’s earliest published stories, Cameron sits down with Elena Michajlowska and Rosamund Bartlett, editors of a new collection.
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A short review of Sayat Nova (1969) / The Color of Pomegranates, directed by Sergei Parajanov. Plus, five other films I really liked this year.
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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?”
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