In the name of the Benefactor, therefore, we proclaim to all the numbers of the One State: Everyone who feels capable of doing so must compose tracts, odes, manifestoes, poems, or other works extolling the beauty and the grandeur of the One State. This will be the first cargo to be carried by the Integral. … Continue reading »
Bedridden, I took a rest from all writing the other week. Last week was for catching up on the many things I left behind as I took to bed. Last Wednesday, for instance, we had the book launch of the college’s literary portfolio Busay during the college’s Buwan ng Wika celebration. This post is a … Continue reading »
a. Lee Gandhi’s critical introduction to postcolonial theory is a good overview of the subject. b. I think Jose Duke Bagulaya’s Writing Literary History: Mode of Economic Production and Twentieth Century Waray Poetry reads too much like a cross between academic writing and a pamphlet. My former marketing professors would call its style one of … Continue reading »
The first half of the 20th Century affirmed humanity’s capacity to rise above difficulties. The exploitative order was directly challenged by the building of a really-existing alternative to capitalism in Russia and parts of Eastern Europe while various movements for national liberation multiplied in what were then the oppressed colonies and semi-colonies of the Western … Continue reading »
Well, but with sorcery, as everyone knows, once it starts, there’s no stopping it. p. 103 Mikhail Bulgakov’s cult masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, one of the finest classics of 20th Century Russian literature, has not more than once been publicized as a criticism of Stalin’s soviet republic. The fact that it was published not … Continue reading »
The title of Turgenev’s last novel, Virgin Soil, evokes Russia’s vast countrysides and its fertile lands, ready to receive the seed of future crops from the farmer’s hands. It also indirectly refers to the Russian peasantry, the object of propaganda and organizing actions by the ‘Going to the People’ movement of the 1870s, which is … Continue reading »
On the Eve by Ivan Turgenev is a love story, the plot of which most of us today would find commonplace. When the novel first appeared, however, this story of a young upper class Russian lady falling in love with a Bulgarian revolutionary caused quite a stir among its readers. Continue reading »
Leo Tolstoy’s Hadji Murad begins with this now very familiar device of the unnamed first-person narrator who vanishes, replaced in the rest of the text by an omniscient one, after the story’s premises are introduced.* On his way home, the narrator came across this beautiful thistle plant called “Tartar,” which he plucks with great difficulty: … Continue reading »
[N]ever ask the woman for forgiveness! Especially if you really love her, however guilty you may be before her. A woman is so peculiar… the moment you admit to a woman that you’ve wronged her and ask her to forgive you, she’ll never stop showering you with reproaches. No woman will ever just forgive you … Continue reading »
The book was extremely interesting; Fyodorov had at once begun reading, from page 26. At the start of a book, a writer is just thinking, and that makes it dull; the most interesting part is the middle, or the end, which was why Fyodorov preferred to choose pages at random—now page 50, now page 214. … Continue reading »
In an interview with The New Yorker‘s fiction editor Deborah Treisman, Robert Chandler, one of Platonov’s translators, merits “Among Animals and Plants” as one of Soviet writer Andrey Platonov’s most important stories. Chandler credits this to the story’s working on so many levels: As a story about family life, it is as perfect in its … Continue reading »
Andrey Platonov’s Soul is the first selection in Soul and Other Stories. I was looking for the book Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman while in Metro Manila last month when I found the Platonov book. When a friend who accompanied me to the bookshop learned that the author was a Soviet writer during Stalin’s reign, he … Continue reading »
The next book I opened, Fathers and Sons by Turgenev, is also set in 19th Century Russia and takes us deeper into the provinces – outside of the town and into the estates and agricultural fields – among the rural gentry and their peasants. Bazarov and Arcady, two newly graduated students brimming with new ideas … Continue reading »
After finishing Dostoevsky’s Demons two weekends ago I proceeded to read a bunch of books a selection of stories and fragments by Chekhov. A young provincial living in the latter parts of 19th Century Russia narrated My Life, one of Chekhov’s few novellas. It opens with the young man, a son of a prominent architect … Continue reading »
I will not begin talking about the many figurative demons that to be sure, and especially after his four years penal servitude in Siberia on account of his involvement with utopian socialist circles, did torment the late great Russian writer. What I will actually do today is note down a few things about a book … Continue reading »
