Here, next to Jean-Paul Belmondo, in the film Borsalino, is Alain Fabien Maurice Marcel Delon, one of the biggest celebrities of modern-era world cinema — and almost certainly the brightest foreign movie star in old USSR circa the time of its protracted decline and slide into non-existence; the idol of two or three generations of… [Read More]
Mikhail Iossel
The Beginning of a Long Road
Earlier today, in a conversation with a friend, I recalled the preposterous little novel I wrote at the age of thirteen: my very first literary work of any sizable scope. The year was 1968; the month was August; the location, Roshchino, a middle-scale lakeside resort community some forty-five minutes away from Leningrad by suburban train…. [Read More]
Nothing Bad Ever Happens on a Day When it Rains Through the Sun
“Nothing bad ever happens on a day when it rains through the sun.” This was said both to me and off into space one afternoon by the ordinarily quarrelsome, foul-mouthed, and altogether pettily malicious old woman who had lived the longest (since shortly after the 1917 revolution, apparently) in the rambling communal apartment of my… [Read More]