{"id":11258,"date":"2013-12-13T16:15:21","date_gmt":"2013-12-13T20:15:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=11258"},"modified":"2013-12-13T16:15:21","modified_gmt":"2013-12-13T20:15:21","slug":"some-russian-lit-updates-for-winter-evenings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/some-russian-lit-updates-for-winter-evenings\/","title":{"rendered":"Some Russian Lit Updates for Winter Evenings"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Stephen Fry Profiles Six Russian Writers in the New Documentary <em>Russia\u2019s Open Book<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><iframe data-src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/vRPDM7OTMrI\" height=\"276\" width=\"490\" allowfullscreen=\"\" frameborder=\"0\" src=\"data:image\/svg+xml;base64,PHN2ZyB3aWR0aD0iMSIgaGVpZ2h0PSIxIiB4bWxucz0iaHR0cDovL3d3dy53My5vcmcvMjAwMC9zdmciPjwvc3ZnPg==\" class=\"lazyload\" data-load-mode=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">via <strong>Open Culture<\/strong>:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov\u2026 someone could design a personality test around which great 19th century Russian writers turned readers on to that most brooding and intense of national literatures. For me it was first Dostoevsky, with an obligatory high school reading of Crime and Punishment, whose ending I hated so much that I had to go on and read The Idiot, The Possessed, Notes From the Underground, and nearly everything else to find out what went wrong. And the mischievous fantasist Gogol I preferred even to Kafka as a young reader, so I\u2019d probably score high on existential angst and absurdist tendencies on whatever we\u2019re calling our literary Meyers-Briggs.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">But we would have to include the 20th century successors: Solzhenitsyn, Bulgakov, Pasternak. The dissenters and exposers of Soviet cruelty and corruption who took on the traditions of stark, brutal realism and darkly comic allegory. All of these are traditions that literary gadabout Stephen Fry rightly points out \u201cchanged the literature, and particularly the literature of the novel, the world over.\u201d Yet somehow, after the fall of the Soviet Union, it\u2019s a literature we seemed to stop hearing about. However, \u201cjust because we stopped reading,\u201d says Fry as host of the documentary above, Russia\u2019s Open Book: Writing in the Age of Putin, \u201cdoesn\u2019t mean the Russians stopped writing.\u201d Produced by Intelligent Television and Wilton films and premiering online today (and on PBS on December 28), the film profiles six new Russian writers most of us haven\u2019t read, but should.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">[Intro text ctd <a href=\"http:\/\/www.openculture.com\/2013\/12\/stephen-fry-profiles-six-russian-writers-in-the-new-documentary-russias-open-book.html\">here<\/a>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Stephen Fry Profiles Six Russian Writers in the New Documentary Russia\u2019s Open Book: via Open Culture: Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov\u2026 someone could design a personality test around which great 19th century Russian&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[1129,1461],"class_list":["post-11258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","tag-russia","tag-stephen-fry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11258"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11261,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11258\/revisions\/11261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}