http://www.novayagazeta.ru/arts/57096.html
Today, on March 6, 2013, Fazil Iskander celebrates his 84th birthday. As it was announced today, the Russian PEN has nominated Fazil Iskander for the 2013 Nobel PRize in LIterature.
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Only a Miracle Could Save Us: Life and Survival under Stalin's Terror, by Irina Sherbakova (NF)
Rights sold: Germany - CAMPUS
For many years, we knew next to nothing about the private lives of ordinary Soviet citizens during Stalin’s reign. Until very recently, the social history of the Soviet Union written by Soviet and Western historians alike was limited entirely to the public sphere – politics and ideology, and the collective experience of the ‘Soviet masses’. The individual (insofar as he or she appeared at all) featured mainly as a letter-writer to the Soviet authorities (that is, as a public actor rather than a private person or member of a family).
It was only from the end of the 1980s that the practice of oral history – politically impossible in the earlier Soviet period – began to develop in Russia. Public organizations like Memorial, established in the late 1980s to represent the victims of repression and record their history, took the lead, collecting testimonies from survivors...
Read moreSergei Prokofiev, a biography, by Igor Vishnevetsky (2009, NF)
Rights sold: Russia - Molodaya Gvardia, World English - GLAGOSLAV
“A classical composer is a mad person composing music, which is not clear to his own generation”, the brilliant Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev, whose 120th birth anniversary will be marked on April 23rd, used to say. However, the date itself is Prokofiev’s imagination, as the author of his biography that was published in 2009 in the Life of Remarkable People series, Igor Vishnevetsky, who is a poet, a prose-writer and a culturologist, says.
"Officially, we celebrate Prokofiev’s birthday, which is the product of his imagination, on April 23rd, while according to the official documents, it should be celebrated on April 27th. Igor Vishnevetsky said in an interview with the Voice of Russia."
One of the old myths was that Sergei Prokofiev was a person, who was seriously interested in nothing at all in his life, except music and...
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