Sophie Pinkham

The Poet’s Double

In the early years of the Soviet Union, Konstantin Vaginov wrote fiction and poetry characterized by a sense of doubleness, ambiguity, and perverse humor.

Mixed Blessings

Uzbekistan has a new biennial, but how many of its aesthetic possibilities are underwritten by authoritarianism?

‘Isn’t Reality Sad Enough?’

In the films of the Ukrainian director Kira Muratova, characters are always tipping toward both laughter and violence. 

Becoming One with Genius

In the translator Jennifer Croft’s new novel, a band of translators from around the world navigates romantic entanglements and their hero worship of an elusive Polish author.

‘Wordlessness in Labor’

Episode Two of “The Critic and Her Publics”

Invasion, Day by Day

Yevgenia Belorusets’s War Diary is rigorous in its focus on the interior life, asking what it means to be at home during a war.

Fireball Over Siberia

A mysterious 1908 meteorite explosion became the object of widespread fascination and fear decades after it occurred.

Immune to Despair

In his novels, rock songs, and social activism, Serhiy Zhadan has long been a builder of bridges in Ukraine, an essential figure in a bitterly divided landscape.

Trade Exceptions

In Brittney Griner, the Putin administration may have found the perfect hostage to leverage into a high-profile prisoner swap.

A Hotter Russia

The cliché, avidly promoted by Moscow, is that Russia will be a relative winner in climate change, but a new book argues that the country will find itself in trouble.

Perversions of Historical Memory

“Writing about Russia feels different after this invasion.”

The Freedom of Historical Fiction

The Formalist literary critic Yuri Tynianov wrote historical novels as “experiments in scholarly fantasy.”

Designs for Living

Svetlana Kana Radević’s architecture adapted modernism to the peculiarities of history and politics in Communist Yugoslavia.

Whose Liberation?

No More Mother-Saviors

Recent collections of poetry by Russian women offer a glimpse of how perceptions of feminism are changing in post-communist Slavic countries.

‘Something Resembling Normal Life’

Paek Nam-nyong’s ‘Friend’ tells ordinary stories of love and divorce in 1980s North Korea.

Living by Lies

Joshua Yaffa’s ‘Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia’

My Quarantine: Savoring the Ramen Western

Tampopo’s ode to the oral ends with a shot of a woman breastfeeding on a sunny park bench. As the credits roll, the camera closes in on the blissful face of the firmly latched infant. Suck, slurp, lick, share: these are joys of living.

Realists of the Soviet Fantasy

Artists like Deineka and Samokhvalov managed to produce valuable work while navigating the shoals of Soviet doctrine.

Blood on the Ice

“As humans hunted and mined at an ever-accelerating pace, they did so with little understanding of the cyclical and finite aspects of life on earth, or of the ways their actions would disrupt the larger ecosystem.”