Today marks the 155th anniversary of the birth of the great French writer Marcel Proust. On this day, literary scholar Armen Zakaryan (YouTube channel «Armen and Fyodor») is publishing, with the Parisian publishing house Éditions Tourgueneff, the book «Conversations About Marcel Proust’s Novel ‘In Search of Lost Time.’» The closest analogue to this work is Vladimir Nabokov’s «Lectures on Foreign Literature»: they are even more interesting to read than the books Nabokov was telling American students about. Zakharyan’s guide to the universe of Proust also grew out of a series of his video lectures. They were prepared for publication by producer Roma Liberov, for whom they served as «great consolation in those dark years into which, like cold murky water, we all stepped». We spoke with Armen Zakharyan about what Proustian prose can console us with today.

#ArmenZakharyan #VladimirNabokov #Dreyfusaffair #interview #bookclub #LeoTolstoy #literature #MarecoeProust #FirstWorldWar #Renaissance #MiddleAges #France #existentialcrisis #Emigration

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Reading Gogun’s major historical study, I kept recalling our family chronicles. The author tells how, in 1946–1947, during preparations for a new world war, army authorities, while freely demobilizing high-ranking officers, sought at the same time to retain combat officers of the lower or middle ranks — with the main emphasis, first and foremost, on field artillery. So it was with my father as well. In 1937, when he was a 14-year-old boy, he was sent off to the camps. Five years later, having miraculously survived, he volunteered for the front and spent the entire war on the front line, commanding an anti-tank 45-mm gun. He was wounded three times. A decorated veteran. In 1947, after a decade of state-imposed captivity, he tried in vain to be demobilized — but they would not release him: «We need officers with front-line experience». He was let go only after, in one of his countless applications, he dared to mention his sentence under Article 58 of the Criminal Code for «counterrevolutionary activity», which he had concealed in army forms («At the time I considered it necessary to keep that hidden»).

#YeiintheUSSR #ideology #historyoftheUSSR #bookclub #communism #worldrevolution #repressionsintheUSSR #review #Stalin #WorldWarIII

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There will be much more written about Zelensky – both good and bad, admiring and hateful, grateful and contemptuous. For now, we have been given the opportunity to trace how this man, by fate and his own ambitions, found himself on the Golgotha of war.

#biography #VladimirZelensky #WarinUkraine #DNR #Donbass #bookclub #Putin #Russia #Ukraine

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