This week, Matt and Cameron take a break from their daily Grossman grind™ to talk about what they’ve been getting up to for fun this month, about Cameron’s deep fear and love for the sea and its creatures, as well as a ChatGPT’s take on how you should be reading Dostoevsky.
Major themes: Dissertations, fears of sea monsters, DostoevskyGPT
The music used in this episode was “Старое Кино / Staroye Kino,” by Перемотка / Peremotka. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube.
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.
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.
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.
