The results are in for our 55th Anniversary Subscriber Contest. One in 14 entries were winners, and over $1200 in prizes are mailing out to lucky subscribers this week!

Reviews of some recent books on Tolstoy, Spying and the end of the USSR. And a new translation of an often overlooked work by Dostoyevsky. As published in the November/December 2011 issue of Russian Life.

How to explain the feeling of sadness and loss that overcame me, as it did many others at hearing the new of Steve Job's death? I think it is simply that we have lost a visionary, a modern prophet, someone who changed the way we see the world. And when the world loses someone like that, especially when they are so young, it feels like the world has lost a bit of its future...

To celebrate our 55th anniversary, we're holding a subscription contest. Appropriately, there will be 55 prizes, which means some pretty good odds of winning for everyone. 

Starting October 1 and running through February 19 of next year, The Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis will be hosting an exhibit devoted to gold and ceramic relics dating from the Neolithic age to the Byzantine era, and unearthed in present-day Ukraine.

It should come as no surprise,” writes Vyacheslav Pyetsukh at the beginning of The New Moscow Philosophy, “that where literature goes life follows, that Russians not only write what they live but in part live what they write…”

It is the great, cruel paradox of World War II in Russia that heinous, unanswered crimes coexisted with truly heroic, astonishing human achievement. That – be it out of fear or love of the Motherland or self-defense – Soviets fought so bravely to defend a system that treated them like cattle, confiscating from them the land, the bread and the peace that the Revolution had allegedly been all about, shipping them and their relatives off to Siberian labor camps, sentencing soldiers unfortunate enough to have been captured in war into “penal battalions.”

In her introduction to the next issue of Chtenia (coming in July to a mailbox near you!), Tamara Edelman writes several Russian films set in summer, including a Mosfilm classic I Step through Moscow. "Summer," she writes, "is a time for growing up, a time for educating the senses, for better understanding one's self. It is a time for transformation."

Listen to the Book Expo America podcast episode with 4 Russian writers who were finalists for the Debut Prize, the prestigious independent literary award for authors under the age of 25 writing in Russian. I am very pleased to point out that Iryna Bogatyreva, one of the writers featured on this panel, is represented in the

The summer issue of Chtenia is about to go to print, and, yet again, it has shaped up into an eclectic and yet harmonious collection of excellent writing.  One of the poets we're including in this issue is Maximilian Voloshin, the free spirit extraordinaire, a painter and a mythologue. 

What exactly is a Russian liberal? Has this species ever been seen in the wild (by which I mean the Kremlin)? In her spot-on analysis of Russia's ruling tandem in today's Washington Post, Liliya Shevtsova highlights this question brilliantly...

For a Russophile, it can be frustrating to find out about an interesting event related to Russia after it has just happened. On the flip side, it can also be rather difficult to find out about new events far enough in advance before they happen, especially events in your area, so that one can attend.