Lost and Found in Russia

By -
Lost and Found in Russia: Lives in a Post-Soviet Landscape, by Susan Richards

Susan Richards has been traveling regularly to Russia, writing about Russia, and trying to help people in Russia for quite a while now.  Here, she chronicles chapters from her visits over the past 20-odd years, ever since the fall of Communism.

Every section covers two or three years and begins with a short explanation of what was going on in Russia at the time.  (This is really helpful if you were in college in 1994 and missed much of Yeltsin's decline through lack of TV or news.)   It goes from 1992-2008, so there's a lot of stuff happening--the book is only about 300 pages long, but they are dense.  Richards visits several friends--often the same ones, so we can follow them over the years--and visits various spots to see what's going on.

Post-Soviet Russia, as described by Richards, is a difficult place to live.  Her friends cope in different ways; some are trying to run businesses while avoiding the thugs taking over everything, another joins an odd religious movement, and some try to actively fight the corruption, which is very dangerous indeed.  All the stories are gripping--and worrying.

This is one of those books I'm having a hard time describing, but it was really good.  If you're interested in Russia, read it.  Plus I learned some background for today's situation with Ukraine and the Crimea.



Comments

  1. AnonymousJune 20, 2014 at 7:08 AM

    Sounds really interesting! I don't know that much about Russia, apart from a few very basic words of Russian, so this would be a good read for me.

    ReplyDelete
  2. ArenelJune 22, 2014 at 12:18 PM

    Interesting! I often feel I should read something about the 90th in Russia, because I was too little then and all I know is stories my parents have told me about the lack of food and goods, etc. But I am totally ignorant of the big picture...

    ReplyDelete
  3. ArenelJune 22, 2014 at 12:18 PM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more