The Three Times I Saw God in Science Fiction Movies
1. The first time I saw God He was yelling at William Shatner. Shatner was yelling back. I was twelve years old. Judging by his belly and makeup, Shatner was… Read more »
Tunguska, Bro: The Russian Plot of Longing and Delusion
I first encountered the word “Tunguska” the way everyone should encounter it: in a dank, dimly-lit room, surrounded by fellow true believers and the reek of freshly-delivered pizza. It had… Read more »
How to cure us: the medical demons and demonic medicine of Dr. Mikhail Bulgakov
Like most men of science, Serge Voronoff was a romantic. His dream was simple: to prove the viability of cross-species tissue grafts—or, in layman’s terms, to replace the past-their-prime testicles… Read more »
A gallery of burning buildings: 10 first paragraphs about The End in Russian literature
10. Here is how it will end: you will be on a train. You will be walking down a street, in St. Petersburg. You will be riding a red horse.… Read more »
Hey, Verne!: Putin, Power, and the Mysterious Island of Spaceship Russia
On July 27th, 2012, Vladimir Churov made a surprise appearance. The surprising part wasn’t that he appeared: after all, as both the man in charge of Russia’s recently-concluded presidential elections… Read more »
The Red and the White: Russian literature’s general theories of the moon
The most memorable moon in Russian literature is no moon at all. It appears—like the most memorable everything else in Russian literature—in Alexander Pushkin’s novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin as the face… Read more »
Good Pkhentzes
One thing that science fiction writers appear to have agreed on over the years is that the future will not be funny. Shiny? Yes. Jumpsuited? I think we can count… Read more »
Space Monkees
In 1968, or so the story goes, Gene Roddenberry had a problem. His critically-acclaimed television series Star Trek was being attacked in the press – not the American papers, but the Soviet ones.
… Read more »
The Art of Translation: Alexander Kuprin’s The Duel
Believe the hype: literature-loving Americans are currently living in a golden age of translation. But what is translation? And how did it get so gilt? … Read more »
The Art of Translation: Kuprin’s The Duel (pt.4)
Believe the hype: literature-loving Americans are currently living in a golden age of translation. But what is translation? And how did it get so gilt? In 2008, the good people… Read more »