August 03, 2024

Left Behind


Left Behind

The remarkable prisoner swap between Russia and the West last week, engineered by the US White House, freed many unjustly imprisoned Americans and others, including a few prominent Russian dissidents.

But, according to RFE/RL, hundreds of Russian political prisoners are still incarcerated (a minimum of 800 have been catalogued by Memorial), and an untold number of foreign citizens are being held in Russian jails. These are some of those that we know about, according to RFE/RL:

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Bilingual series of short, lesser known, but highly significant works that show the traditional view of Dostoyevsky as a dour, intense, philosophical writer to be unnecessarily one-sided. 
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93 Untranslatable Russian Words

Every language has concepts, ideas, words and idioms that are nearly impossible to translate into another language. This book looks at nearly 100 such Russian words and offers paths to their understanding and translation by way of examples from literature and everyday life. Difficult to translate words and concepts are introduced with dictionary definitions, then elucidated with citations from literature, speech and prose, helping the student of Russian comprehend the word/concept in context.

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