Belgravia Books – The Distinguished Assassin Book Launch
Book launch at Belgravia Books on 13th June
Read MoreThe Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevskii
Man is a wolf to man, according to The Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevskii’s The Brothers Karamazov. He has no inclination to be good, but is weak and rebellious. He cannot escape from the compulsion of logic. He is doomed to self-destruct through the assertion of his will. His quest for harmony is futile, unless he submits to a strictly ordered paradise on earth. The necessary forces of “miracle, mystery and authority” must be enforced in this “spiritual kingdom,” in the words of The...
Read MorePutin, a modern day Stalin
Masha Gessen, the Russian journalist, wrote a very important book last year, published by Granta in the UK. The Man Without a Face is a devastating portrait of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, a man who, when he took power of Russia in 2000, swiftly dismantled the young mechanisms of democracy put in place by his drunken predecessor Yeltsin and ruthlessly silenced all critics, be this through repressive legislation, forced exile or murder. The former KGB man was not interested, despite...
Read MoreScreen heroes under totalitarian rule
Totalitarianism is a political system in which the state holds total authority over society and seeks to control all aspects of public and private life where necessary. It is an appalling political system to live under, and yet its exploration and depiction in film can make for great cinema. Why? Because, from a dramatic standpoint, there is nothing better than pitting a decent, lone hero against a cruel, uniform power. At first the latter seems unbreakable, on account of the sheer extent of...
Read MoreThe marks of a thief-in-law
Brought to popular western culture in the contemporary film Eastern Promises directed by David Cronenberg, and now on display at the Saatchi Gallery in the post-Soviet portraits of Sergei Vasiliev, the tattoo code language of criminals in the USSR had its roots far earlier, in Stalin’s Russia, amongst the thieves-in-law (vory v zakonye) – the elite of the Soviet Union’s criminal class. Formed as a society for ruling the criminal underworld within the prison camps – necessary after...
Read MoreWhy I wrote The Distinguished Assassin
As a postgraduate student of Russian literature at the University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies in 1995, I will never forget my first encounter with Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, a staggering work that powerfully, and methodically, documents the vast network of forced labour camps that existed throughout the former Soviet Union. What is most striking about this work, as much as the quality and scope of its historical record, however, is its searing honesty,...
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