Izbavi Bog i nas ot etakikh sudei

A few weeks ago something strange happened. Someone sent me, through the post, ten million printed words – I’ll repeat that, in case you weren’t concentrating: ten million words – nearly half of them in a difficult foreign language. I was told to get reading them.

The first day ended with an evening with Dmitry Bykov and Bridget Kendall at Waterstone’s, Piccadilly. Bykov entertained the large audience with, along with everything else, a joke. It went like this: “At birth you get a label put on your arm, after death, it’s put on your foot. If someone gets the same number both times, they win a prize – a pressure cooker.”

Wednesday, 16 April, 6.30 pm
Waterstone’s Piccadilly, 5th Floor, £3
Orlando Figes, historian and award winning writer, discusses his latest book “The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia” with Alexander Ilichevsky, winner of the Russian Booker Prize 2007 and editor of radio “Svoboda”
In English and Russian

Orlando Figes is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is a reputable writer of works on Russian history, most notably A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 (1996), for which he was awarded the Wolfson Prize; Natasha's Dance (2002) and The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (2007), all of which have been reviewed to international acclaim and translated into many foreign languages. He has appeared on many television and radio broadcasts, commenting on events in Russia and on Russian cultural and historical issues, and he is a regular book reviewer for the New York Review of Books. He is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. It is a great privilege to have Orlando as a speaker at Russian Literature Week.

Imperial Russian Ballet
Oranienbaum: Chinoiserie a la Russe
A la Russe: the Russian art of performance through the 18th and 19th centuries is celebrated in this issue, dedicated to Russia’s most famous ballets and to Catherine the Great’s personal Dacha – Oranienbaum.

Imperial Russian Ballet
Oranienbaum: Chinoiserie a la Russe
A la Russe: the Russian art of performance through the 18th and 19th centuries is celebrated in this issue, dedicated to Russia’s most famous ballets and to Catherine the Great’s personal Dacha – Oranienbaum.

Wednesday, 16 April, 6.30 pm
Waterstone’s Piccadilly, 5th Floor, £3
Orlando Figes, historian and award winning writer, discusses his latest book “The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia” with Alexander Ilichevsky, winner of the Russian Booker Prize 2007 and editor of radio “Svoboda”
In English and Russian

Orlando Figes is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is a reputable writer of works on Russian history, most notably A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 (1996), for which he was awarded the Wolfson Prize; Natasha's Dance (2002) and The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (2007), all of which have been reviewed to international acclaim and translated into many foreign languages. He has appeared on many television and radio broadcasts, commenting on events in Russia and on Russian cultural and historical issues, and he is a regular book reviewer for the New York Review of Books.

The Ties of Blood
Russian Literature from the 21st Century
This edition of Rossica takes on a new form! It is an Anthology of New Russian Writing, featuring both prose and poetry translated into English and edited by leading specialists.
The issue was launched at the first Russian Literature Week, in April 2008.