A very different read than my usual book. This is a collection of newspaper articles written in Estonia during the late 1970s, each followed by a longer description, often satirical (intended? or otherwise) which provides the true background of the articles. Through this the reader sees a sample of what is happening in the outskirts of the Soviet Union though a few peoples' eyes. We see the futility of many peoples' lives, the disruption of drink, the looseness of truth.I was considering 3.5 as a rating but will bump it to 4. This author was recommended to me by one of my doctors who is also a Russian emigre. (I asked her for recommendations at my last appointment).

Dostoevsky’s most revolutionary novel, Notes from Underground marks the dividing line between nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, and between the visions of self each century embodied. One of the most remarkable characters in literature, the unnamed narrator is a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence. In complete retreat from society, he scrawls a passionate, obsessive, self-contradictory narrative that serves as a devastating attack on social utopianism and an assertion of man’s essentially irrational nature.Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, whose Dostoevsky translations have become the standard, give us a brilliantly faithful edition of this classic novel, conveying all the tragedy and tormented comedy of the original.

Genre of drinking songs is known since the ancient times and by writing his drinking poem Venedikt Erofeev managed to widen boundaries of the genre significantly. Moscow to the End of the Line is written in a gloomy but frilly vers libre.The protagonist awakens to a fine and crisp morning full of freshness…Oh, that morning burned in the heart! Oh, the illusory nature of calamity. Oh, the irretrievable! What’s worse about this burden which no one has yet called by any name, what’s worse – paralysis, or nausea? Nervous exhaustion or mortal sorrow somewhere in the region of the heart? But, if that all equal, then all the same what’s worse about it – tetanus, or fever?And using commuter rail the hero embarks on the epochal suburban journey. And some local travels can be much more exotic than any voyages around the world… While travelling one may encounter a lot of intriguing fellow commuters…The other passengers looked at me almost indifferently with their round, vacant eyes.I like that. I like that my country’s people have such empty, bulging eyes. This instills in me a feeling of legitimate pride. You can imagine what the eyes are like where everything is bought and sold – deeply hidden, secretive, predatory and frightened. Devaluation, unemployment, pauperism… People look at you distrustfully, with restless anxiety and torment. That’s the kind of eyes they have in the world of Filthy Lucre.And the travelled distance corresponds to the consumed liquor… And the more one drinks the stranger becomes the world and the more enigmatic turns reality…If I should ever have any children, I’ll hang on their wall a portrait of the Procurator of Judaea, Pontius Pilate, so that they will grow up neat and clean. Procurator Pontius Pilate standing there washing his hands – that’s the right kind of portrait.Even the most hopeless boozers must have their romantic ideals…

Venya is more interested in how much he and his colleagues can drink during the working day than in his job. Once he is fired, he spends the last of his money on booze and sets off on a train journey to visit beautiful, picturesque, utopian Petushki, where his beloved and child are waiting for him. But Venya's drinking gets out of control on the train, and Petushki seems to lie increasingly beyond his grasp.Funny and sad, Yerofeev's alcohol-soaked story of a man on a train perfectly captures Soviet society on the brink of doom: exhausted, corrupt and heading into the night in sodden dignity.'A dark and hilarious work cocktailing the satire of Gogol with the gutter-level eye of Bukowski and the menace and nightmare vision of Genet.' Time OutMoscow Stations -- the only novel published by the Russian writer Venedikt Yerofeev -- was written in 1969 and existed first only amongst samizdat circles, as a typed manuscript passed hand to hand by readers in Soviet Russia. It was first published officially in the magazine Sobriety and Culture in 1989. This translation was first published by Faber in 1997.

Dead Souls is eloquent on some occasions, lyrical on others, and pious and reverent elsewhere. Nicolai Gogol was a master of the spoof. The American students of today are not the only readers who have been confused by him. Russian literary history records more divergent interpretations of Gogol than perhaps of any other classic.In a new translation of the comic classic of Russian literature, Chichikov, an enigmatic stranger and conniving schemer, buys deceased serfs' names from their landlords' poll tax lists hoping to mortgage them for profit and to reinvent himself as a likeable gentleman.

Nikolai Gogol was born in the Ukraine in 1809. Vladimir Nabokov wrote of his work that "after reading Gogol one's eyes may become gogolized, and one is apt to see bits of his world in the most unexpected places." He died in 1852 after subjecting himself to a severe regime of fasting. "The Overcoat" and "The Nose" are two of Gogol's finest works. "The Nose" is a masterpiece of comic art, and "The Overcoat" is considered one of the greatest short stories ever written. Cover painting: Paul Cezanne,  Portrait of the Painter Achille Empereur, c. 1869. Musee d'Orsay, Paris. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, N.Y.

Russian Fiction

author

book

I Remember

1979 American war film directed by Francis Ford Coppola

1987 war drama film directed by Stanley Kubrick

1970 film directed by Franklin J. Schaffner

War Films

1999 American historical fiction film by John McTiernan

Sword and Sorcery films

When we were young!  Tv and British films from the late 60's to the 90s with a few classics thrown in. 

British TV and Films 

Russian dramatist and author (1860–1904)

Classic Fiction Writers

American TV Shows

Classic Comic Books 

American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

20th Century Weird & Horror Fiction

Film Noir

Investment Books I have read. Only includes books that I personally think are particularly useful or interesting, as a lot of them have variations on themes. 