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Show Notes:

This week, Cameron talks about unreliable narrators in Yevgenia Belorusets’ Lucky Breaks and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, posing an unusual argument: what if lying to your reader was a good thing?

Belorusets is a Ukrainian writer whose work focuses on the people marginalized by society and takes that eye toward the East, writing stories of women from the Donbas region after war broke out in 2014. Her work brings a light to stories often left untold — and even poses questions about the morality of doing so. 

Yevgenia Belorusets’ website

“The Complaint Against Language” in Wartime Ukraine: A Conversation with Yevgenia Belorusets, interview by Eugene Ostashevsky

Yevgenia Belorusets Focus On Ukraine, Creative Horizons (video, 2024)

One Day More — Yevgenia Belorusets’ visit to Brussels

The music used in this episode was “Старое Кино / Staroye Kino,” by Перемотка / Peremotka. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube. 

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Show Notes:

This week, in For Your Consideration, Cameron dives into Belarusian writer Alhierd Bacharevič’s Alindarka’s Children and Laguna-Pueblo-American writer Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. Both novels explore people native to a land that is now, in different ways, hostile to them. 

Alindarka’s Children follows Avi and Sia’s fairy tale-like journey escaping a camp where they’re fed “vitamins” and taught to speak the correct Lingo, rejecting their own language. Their trip is beset by an unstable father, who insistantly passed their native Leid, a forest witch, a “corrected” hunter and other dangers. Written in both English and Scots to capture the Russian and Belarusian of the original, the novel challenges the reader’s understanding of linguistic and cultural preservation. 

Ceremony is downstream of Marmon Silko’s brief attempt to write a humorous story about the native WW2 veterans of her childhood, who often drank heavily to deal with their trauma. As the wrote, though, she found that it really wasn’t very funny at all. Her exploration of Tayo’s PTSD, and the struggle to find a way forward, is a profoundly empathetic approach to everyone involved. 

Alhierd Bacharevič: “Belarus is the place where literary subjects are just lying under our feet.”

Special Problems in Teaching Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Ceremony” by Paula Gunn Allen

I have lost everything: The impact of homeless sweeps - Propublica

The music used in this episode was “Старое Кино / Staroye Kino,” by Перемотка / Peremotka. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube. 

Our links: Website | ⁠Discord⁠ 

Socials: Instagram⁠ | BlueSky | Twitter⁠ | Facebook

Questions, comments, want to hear your voice on a bonus episode? Send us an email at [email protected].

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Show Notes:

This week, Cameron dives into William T. Vollmann’s Europe Central and Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. The uniting theme this week: reflection and memory. Both novels cast a long shadow over his life, so it’s time to untangle exactly why that is. 

Can Europe Central be cleanly read as a series of parables? Is it appropriate to turn Hitler into a sort-of fairy tale? Is it a red flag that Cameron has read Norwegian Wood six times? Tune in to find your answers. 

“Shostakovich in Love: William T. Vollmann’s Europe Central” by Peter G. Christiansen

The music used in this episode was “Старое Кино / Staroye Kino,” by Перемотка / Peremotka. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube. 

Our links: Website | ⁠Discord⁠ 

Socials: Instagram⁠ | BlueSky | Twitter⁠ | Facebook

Questions, comments, want to hear your voice on a bonus episode? Send us an email at [email protected].

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Show Notes:

This week, Cameron dives solo into two books: Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me by Teffi and In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien. He’ll pull apart their authors’ mutual love for taking a creative license to their own lives.

Major themes: Emotional truth, social expectations, Vietnam

The interview with Tim O’Brien I read from.

The documentary on My Lai I mentioned.

Seymour Hersh’s article on My Lai 

The music used in this episode was “Старое Кино / Staroye Kino,” by Перемотка / Peremotka. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube. 

Our links: Website | ⁠Discord⁠ 

Socials: Instagram⁠ | BlueSky | Twitter⁠ | Facebook

Questions, comments, want to hear your voice on a bonus episode? Send us an email at [email protected].

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Show Notes:

Pick up a copy of The Story of Sonechka here.

This week, Cameron dives into Marina Tsvetaeva’s The Story of Sonechka, a recollection of her relationship with the actress Sonia Holliday in Moscow, 1919. The story — one of the clearest examples of queer literature we’ve had on the podcast — reflects not only Marina and Sonia themselves, but also questions on relationships, memory and how we understand each other. 

Joining him to talk about the novel is Inessa Fishbeyn and C. D. C. Reeve, who translated The Story of Sonechka into English for the first time. 

Fishbeyn is an independent writer and translator of Russian literature, born and educated in Kazan, Russia. 

Reeve is DKE Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he specializes in ancient Greek philosophy and has translated many of the works of Plato and Aristotle and written books, commentaries, and essays on them. 

Major themes: Love Triangles, Queer literature, Knowing the other

The music used in this episode was “Старое Кино / Staroye Kino,” by Перемотка / Peremotka. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube. 

Our links: Website | ⁠Discord⁠ 

Socials: Instagram⁠ | BlueSky | Twitter⁠ | Facebook

Questions, comments, want to hear your voice on a bonus episode? Send us an email at [email protected].

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A quick look forward to our June episodes plus a little apology for the delayed episode this month.

If you'd like to join our monthly book club, you can join our discord here.

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Show Notes:

This week, Cameron dives into Ukrainian writer Yuri Andrukhovych’s The Moscoviad, a picaresque-cum-magical realist novel following the poet Otto von F. as he spends one day trying to accomplish a few chores around Moscow: a visit to a meeting, a reunion with a sort-of girlfriend, and a gift for his friend’s children. 

This journey takes him to beer halls, into the sewers, into the attention of the KGB and beyond. Set in the very late Soviet Union, Andrukhovych tackles the place of colonized subject in imperial core, the uneasy “friendship of peoples,” and life in a failing empire. 

Joining him to talk about the novel is Dr. Vitaly Chernetsky. A professor at the University of Kansas, Chernetsky is the author of the book Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization. In addition to The Moscoviad, he has translated into English Yuri Andrukovych’s Twelve Circles, Sophia Andrukovych’s Felix Austria, along with two poetry collections, scholarly articles and historical documents. 

He is the president of the Shevchenko Scientific Society, and has previously served as the director of the University of Kansas’ Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, the president of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies, and the president of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 

Major themes: Empire, beer vending machines, subverted machismo

The music used in this episode was “Старое Кино / Staroye Kino,” by Перемотка / Peremotka. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube. 

Our links: Website | ⁠Discord⁠ 

Socials: Instagram⁠ | BlueSky | Twitter⁠ | Facebook

Questions, comments, want to hear your voice on a bonus episode? Send us an email at [email protected] or call our voicemail at 209.800.3944

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Show Notes:

This week, Cameron dives into the poetry of Vsevolod Nekrasov, joined by Bela Shayevich and Ainsley Morse who collected and translated works spanning much of his life in I Live I See: Selected Poems.

Born in the USSR in 1934 and writing—mostly unofficially—through the end of his life in 2009 now in the Russian Federation, Vsevolod Nekrasov’s work is largely minimalist and deploys repetition like a musical motif. Some works span pages, while others are no more than a word reflecting itself. His work demands to be read aloud, to a crowd or even just one person. 

Ainsley Morse is an associate professor in UC San Diego’s department of literature. She’s a scholar of 20th and 21st century literature and culture of the post-war Soviet period, particularly unofficial or “underground” poetry, as well as the avant-garde, children's literature and contemporary poetry. She also translates from Russian, Ukrainian, and Bosnian-Serbian-Croatian. 

Bela Shayevich is a Soviet American writer and translator. She is best known for her translation of 2015 Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexi-ye-vich’s Secondhand Time, for which she was awarded the TA First Translation Prize. She has also translated Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. Her writing has appeared in n+1, Jewish Currents, and Harper’s Magazine. She teaches in the Department of Translation at the University of Iowa. 

Major themes: Repetition, Making words mean something, visual poetry

1:36:40 - Elena Kostyuchenko’s I Love Russia 

1:37:10 - Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, The Art of Fiction No. 267

1:39:40 - Goat Song by Konstantin Vaginov

The music used in this episode was “Старое Кино / Staroye Kino,” by Перемотка / Peremotka. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube. 

Our links: Website | ⁠Discord⁠ 

Socials: Instagram⁠ | BlueSky | Twitter⁠ | Facebook

Questions, comments, want to hear your voice on a bonus episode? Send us an email at [email protected] or call our voicemail at 209.800.3944

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Show Notes:

This week, Cameron ascends into the towering heights of imperial politics in Yaroslav Barsukov’s Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory by Yaroslav Barsukov. The novel follows Shea Ashcroft, an imperial minister whose refusal to gas protesting citizenry has earned him a reassignment to a border region to oversee a fantastical military project. With no one truly on his side and managing strange technologies, Ashcrofts finds himself increasingly out of his depth.

Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory includes and expands on Barsukov’s earlier novella Tower of Mud and Straw. It’s been nominated for a Nebula Award and received a Kirkus Reviews star.

Joining Cameron to talk about the novel is Yaroslav himself. 

Born and raised in Moscow and now living in Austria for quite some time, Yaroslav’s background is in physics and software engineering. His writing career stems from game design, in a manner of speaking. He took up his pen around 2014 after quite enjoying the work of translating a game’s mythology for a pitch

Major themes: Suspicions of war, alien technologies, memory

10:18 - Barsukov’s interview with the podcast “From the Lighthouse”

26:54 - First correction I’ve had to issue in a while — I misremembered the name of the film, which is actually Protozanov’s “Aelita,” not “Anta Odeli Uta,” which is a phrase in the film. 

The music used in this episode was “Старое Кино / Staroye Kino,” by Перемотка / Peremotka. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube. 

Our links: Website | ⁠Discord⁠ 

Socials: Instagram⁠ | BlueSky | Twitter⁠ | Facebook

Questions, comments, want to hear your voice on a bonus episode? Send us an email at [email protected].

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands