Sophie Pinkham

Designs for Living

Svetlana Kana Radević’s architecture adapted modernism to the peculiarities of history and politics in Communist Yugoslavia.

Skirting the Center: Svetlana Kana Radević on the Periphery of Postwar Architecture

an exhibition at the Venice Biennale, Palazzo Palumbo Fossati, May 22–November 21, 2021

September 23, 2021 issue

Whose Liberation?

May 27, 2021 issue

No More Mother-Saviors

Recent collections of poetry by Russian women offer a glimpse of how perceptions of feminism are changing in post-communist Slavic countries.

F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry

edited by Galina Rymbu, Eugene Ostashevsky, and Ainsley Morse, and translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky, Ainsley Morse, Alex Karsavin, Helena Kernan, Kit Eginton, Valzhyna Mort, and Kevin M.F. Platt

The Scar We Know

by Lida Yusupova, edited by Ainsley Morse and translated from the Russian by Sibelan Forrester, Martha Kelly, Brendan Kiernan, Madeline Kinkel, Hilah Kohen, Ainsley Morse, Stephanie Sandler, Joseph Schlegel, and Bela Shayevich

Life in Space

by Galina Rymbu, translated from the Russian by Joan Brooks, Helena Kernan, Charles Bernstein, Kevin M.F. Platt, and Anastasiya Osipova, and with a preface by Eugene Ostashevsky

April 29, 2021 issue

Letter

Amy Knight

Whose Liberation?

May 27, 2021 issue

‘Something Resembling Normal Life’

Paek Nam-nyong’s ‘Friend’ tells ordinary stories of love and divorce in 1980s North Korea.

Friend: A Novel from North Korea

by Paek Nam-nyong, translated from the Korean by Immanuel Kim

December 3, 2020 issue

Vladimir Putin and Konstantin Ernst admiring a replica sword from a film produced by Ernst, Moscow, December 2016

Living by Lies

Joshua Yaffa’s ‘Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia’

Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia

by Joshua Yaffa

August 20, 2020 issue

Koji Yakusho as the gangster and Fukumi Kuroda as his mistress in Tampopo, 1985

My Quarantine: Savoring the Ramen Western

Tampopo’s ode to the oral ends with a shot of a woman breastfeeding on a sunny park bench. As the credits roll, the camera closes in on the blissful face of the firmly latched infant. Suck, slurp, lick, share: these are joys of living.

May 8, 2020

Realists of the Soviet Fantasy

Artists like Deineka and Samokhvalov managed to produce valuable work while navigating the shoals of Soviet doctrine.

Deineka/Samokhvalov

an exhibition at the Manege Central Exhibition Hall, St. Petersburg, November 18, 2019–January 19, 2020

May 14, 2020 issue

Chukchi hunting a gray whale in the Bering Sea, Chukotka, Russia, June 2018

Blood on the Ice

Bathsheba Demuth’s ‘Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait’

Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait

by Bathsheba Demuth

November 7, 2019 issue

Ukraine’s New Leading Man

June 27, 2019 issue

A worker measuring radiation after the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine, August 1986

The Chernobyl Syndrome

Three new books on the disaster and our radioactive world

Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future

by Kate Brown

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster

by Adam Higginbotham

Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe

by Serhii Plokhy

April 4, 2019 issue