Containing Russia

Alexander Kluge, Russia Container, trans. Alexander Booth (Chicago: Seagull Books, 2022). 392pp., £27.50 hb., 978 1 80309 065 8Russia Container is not a book about Russia. It’s about the images and stories that East Germans had of Soviet Russia before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and after. Alexander Kluge wrote it ‘on commission’ by his sister Alexandra Kluge, who, unlike her brother, lived in the German Democratic Republic after the separation of their parents. There Alexandra learnt...

Russian Woodpecker

Near Matches Ignore ExactFull Text Everything2 Russian Woodpecker (thing) See all of Russian Woodpecker, no other writeups in this node. (thing) by The Custodian Mon Apr 19 2004 at 21:37:21 The Russian Woodpecker Not an avian at all, the Russian Woodpecker was the vast, faceless and distant enemy of most of the users of shortwave radio in the Western World for eight or nine years, beginning in 1976. Folks were going about their electronic business in North America one day (Jul...

Russian paper on cinematographic propaganda

Download PDFFirst column translated (from Russian) Keywords: propaganda, cinematography, Russia, politics, art. Art, as we know, reflects politics even when conscious intentions do not want to have anything to do with it. Since the 20th century, cinema has become one of the main channels for the production of political values. The intensification of its use occurred during times of war, but even in relatively peaceful conditions, political regimes directly or indirectly influenced films. It...

Journey to the Golden Age

There on a plain, a multitude. From a distance—a hill or the eye of a soaring bird—one could see numberless little dots in the shape of men assembled around a lesser crowd in the middle. There was a great distance separating them. Focusing the gaze, one could make out the silhouettes: a great many feathers brandished in the air over a palette of colors that gave the frenzy an almost carnival atmosphere. A pointillist would have had a field day with the scene, were it not for the shimmering, a...

49th PARALLEL

49th PARALLEL (11)By: Joshua Glenn February 6, 2023 University of Toronto philosopher Mark Kingwell and HILOBROW‘s Josh Glenn are coauthors of The Idler’s Glossary (2008), The Wage Slave’s Glossary (2011), and The Adventurer’s Glossary (2021). While researching and writing their respective sections of the latter book, they engaged in an epistolary exchange about real-world and fictional adventures. (As intended, passages from this exchange appear verbatim in the book.) Via the series 49th PA...

Harrisons Art of Generosity - Poetics and Ecology

The Harrisons’ Art of Generosity: Poetics and EcologyMonica ManolescuThis article offers a literary perspective on Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison’s discourses, texts, stories and voices, and the ways in which they act in performative ways, creating an art of doing things with words. I would like to argue that this performativity is the expression of a strong commitment to the present moment that Camus qualified as "generosity" and that defines the models of authorship, agency, art-m...

The Russian Empire Pre-Revolution: Recreating the Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record

His ultimate goal was to educate the schoolchildren of Russia with his "optical color projections" of history.Curated/Reviewed by Matthew A. McIntoshPublic HistorianBrewminateIntroductionThe photographs of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863–1944) offer a vivid portrait of a lost world—the Russian Empire on the eve of World War I and the coming revolution. His subjects ranged from the medieval churches and monasteries of old Russia, to the railroads and factories of an emerging industr...

The Russian Empire Pre-Revolution: Recreating the Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record

His ultimate goal was to educate the schoolchildren of Russia with his "optical color projections" of history.Curated/Reviewed by Matthew A. McIntoshPublic HistorianBrewminateIntroductionThe photographs of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863–1944) offer a vivid portrait of a lost world—the Russian Empire on the eve of World War I and the coming revolution. His subjects ranged from the medieval churches and monasteries of old Russia, to the railroads and factories of an emerging industr...

The Lull

"It’s a dead calm, isn’t it?" "It is, sir. But there’s something out of the common coming, for sure."—Joseph Conrad, Typhoon Nothing happens. A dull sea, the color of slate, mirrors the gray skies billowing above. The sun flickers through the mist, its pale disc begging for an appearance, like an old actor whose glory has passed. The wind has slackened. Any sense of direction and purpose has given way to aimless drift. Time seems to have come to a halt. Ennui builds—and yet, the stillness is ...

Analysis of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer

In late 1909, Joseph Conrad broke off working on his political novel about Russia, Under Western Eyes, to write the short story "The Secret-Sharer: An Episode from the Sea." First issued in two parts in 1910, in the August and September issues of Harper’s Monthly Magazine, it was later published, in October 1912, as the second of three stories in the collection ’Twixt Land and Sea: Tales. The story is generally accepted as Conrad’s rewriting of a killing, subsequent escape, and apparent suici...

The Soviet Sci-Fi Classic That Inspired Annihilation

The Soviet Sci-Fi Classic That Inspired Annihilation Paramount By Witney Seibold/March 31, 2022 10:15 am EDT Based on the first book in Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, Alex Garland's 2018 film "Annihilation" is a contemplative and trippy sci-fi fable about a team of scientists who infiltrate an area — nickn...

Revisiting Andrei Tarkovsky's Cinematic Icon Solaris

Happy 50th anniversary to Solaris! And happy 20th anniversary to Solaris! Thanks to Tarkovsky’s version in 1972, and Steven Soderbergh’s in 2002, we all owe Solaris a set of fine china and something gold. I’ve been thinking about what to say here. And. Look, it feels stupid to be writing about movies right now. Non-essential. But writing about this particular movie, a Russian classic about guilt, remorse, love conquering death, maybe, the desperate need for human connection in the face ...

TLS review of An encyclopedia of Cold War Culture from Pollock to Presley - and more clips from 4 Jun 2021 print edition

LRB long form - The Suitcase

TLS clips FEB 2020 - Russian Literature and more

CIA Russia cold war espionage and influence

Trump as uninformed Actor

How Nazi hunters tracked down mass murders in the United States

How Nazi hunters tracked down mass murders in the United States

Battleship Potemkin 1925 | Public Domain Movies

Battleship Potemkin 1925 File:Броненосец «Потёмкин», noaudio.ogv Battleship Potemkin (, ), sometimes rendered as Battleship Potyomkin, is a 1925 silent film directed by Sergei Eisenstein and produced by Mosfilm. It presents a dramatized version of the mutiny that occurred in 1905 when the crew of the Russian battleship Potemkin rebelled against their officers of the Tsarist regime. Battleship Potemkin has been called one of the most influential propaganda films of all time, and was named ...

Where Are We in the Roman Timeline - Armstrong Economics

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