PREP WORK: The Last Letter (2002) by Frederick Wiseman
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.
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 to his mother after her death.
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.
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.
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.
