Aleksander Ageyev is one of the most prominent Russian literary critics and essayists of the 1990s. This volume is a sort of chronicle of modern life; in Ageyev’s own words, «It is difficult to single out the major theme of this book». The author reviews Russian newspapers and magazines for Vremya MN newspaper, contributes op-ed columns for Profil’ magazine, and published on-line his reflections on the current literary life. Taken together these heterogeneous texts form a sort of public diary; its main theme — an individual’s life within the framework of culture.

The book provides “windows” enabling the reader to see both the deeper, historical tendencies in culture as they are seen from today and Russia’s everyday life against the background of the past. The interpretation of “everyday occurrences” is accompanied by talks with renowned culturologists, politicians, psychologists, philosophers, economists as well as artists, musicians, cinema and TV figures, all commenting on various cultural and historical subjects.

The book examines one of the most dramatic problems facing mankind: the phenomenon of suicide. Analyzing its historic, judicial, religious, ethical, philosophic and other aspects, the author pays special attention to the fates of writers-suicides. The concluding part of the book contains biographical notes of over 350 men of letters, who have taken their lives.

The author known as a painter, prose-writer and journalist has devoted his book to the changes in our society, to our morals, to the hard way this country is taking towards civilisation. A sharp, ironic, sometimes sarcastic style is used to depict the paradoxes of Russia’s newly-born democracy, the metamorphoses going on in the political, social and everyday urban life, but primarily – in cultural spheres, i.e., in painting, architecture, sculpture, and literature. The writer’s observations and reflections are shrewd and, incidentally, bitter, yet not devoid of hope.

The collection is made up of notes and other items taken from the notebooks which the prominent philologist Mikhail Gasparov kept over the course of two decades. Some of them have been published by the New Literary Review journal and evoked a great interest on the part of the readers. Here they are intermingled with his reminiscences, interviews, and essays on a variety of non-literary topics.

This collection of essays deals with modern Russian and foreign literature, art and culture. The well-known literary critic, journalist and culturologist is examining the writings of Andrei Sinyavsky, Andrei Bitov, Vladimir Makanin, Sergey Dovlatov, Sasha Sokolov, Vladimir Sorokin, Viktor Pelevin, Joseph Brodsky, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stivens, Jerald Durrell and others as well as the art of Okstein, Bakhchanyan, and Shef. Displaying a keen power of observation and wit, the author also ponders on such diversified and fascinating matters as tattooing or Soviet and American cuisine.

A literary critic and expert in cultural studies presents his view of the 20th-century Russian literature and culture, beginning with the avant-garde and social realism and finishing with the so-called sots-art (“socialist art”) and conceptualism. The writings of V. Mayakovsky, Yu. Tynyanov, A. Belinkov, B. Poplavsky, E. Limonov, Ven. Yerofeyev, Ye. Kharitonov and others, analysed within the framework of world culture, reveal unexpected facets in line with their authors’ conformity, with or opposition to the official totalitarian ideology. Alexander Goldstein’s keen insight and polemical temperament, and brilliant vigorous style have earned him two awards within a year: the 1997 Minor Booker and Anti-Booker prizes.

The diaries of a prominent avant-garde artist Mikhail Grobman cover almost a full decade, introducing the reader to the life of Moscow «underground» artistic circles in the 1960s. The entries recreate the slowly disappearing from the public memory everyday life of those painters, poets, and writers who rejected the norms of official Soviet art, their search for artistic self, the complex relationships between various individuals, between individuals and the state during that decade.

“This book has, for the most part, evolved out of notes I have taken over the years on scraps of paper like candy wrappers, just as main character of my novel ‘The Lines of Fortune or Milashevich’s Sturdy Box’ liked to scribble on the blank side of such wrappers,” is what the 1992 Booker prize-winner Mark Kharitonov wrote about this work. In it he ponders his epoch and human’s life, art and literature, as well as recollects his deceased friends – dissident poet Ilya Gabay, sculptor Vadim Sidur, poet David Samoilov and others.

Grigory Kruzhkov, a prominent translator from English, brings together in this volume his essays and articles, originally published in various magazines and scholarly journals. The first part of this collection, «Pushkin’s English Village» deals with Pushkin’s translations of English poetry; the second, «Communio Poetarum», includes Kruzhkov’s works on Yeats and his contemporaries Vyacheslav Ivanov, Nikolai Gumilev, Osip Mandelshtam, and Anna Akhmatova. Among the themes of this book are the influence of Symbolism on Joyce and Platonov, humor in poetry, eroticism and the problem of translation. The volume also includes quasi-biographical essays and polemical articles. The author’s sensible yet playful style often gives his scholarly articles an air of a detective story.