Anyone familiar with literary devices employed by writers to propel narratives forward must at one point or another have come across one such famous device known as “Chekhov’s gun.” Named after the famed Russian writer and playwright Anton Chekhov, who first theorized about the device in a letter to fellow Russian belletrist Aleksandr Lazarev, the […]
“People ask me: “Why don’t you take photos in color? In color!” But Chernobyl: literally it means black event. There are no other colors there.”― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster The front page of the inaugurating issue of Tribuna Energetika (Energy Worker’s Tribune), announcing the publication of the […]
Question to Radio Armenia:“Is it possible to build Communism in a randomly taken capitalist country, for example, Holland?”Answer:“It’s possible, but what did Holland ever do to you?” In his bilingual compendium of Soviet underground jokes Forbidden Laughter, Emil Draitser makes the pointed, if ironic, observation that “The anecdote in the Soviet Union substitutes for lots […]
For people familiar with American religious history of the late 20th and early 21st centuries and the ubiquity of televangelists, the mise en scène in one particularly famous megachurch looked tried, true, and familiar. The music and the choir slowly fade out in the background while another camera, with the same deliberate speed, steps in […]
On April 8, 1991 Pravda published an article about the 12-th International Symposium of Gravitational Physiology held in Leningrad entitled Love Amongst the Stars. And no, the article was not about international celebrities descending into an orgiastic bender. Rather, it was dedicated to a round table discussion held on the sidelines of the symposium on […]