September 07, 2017

Fake Countries, Sausages, and Mystery Highways


Fake Countries, Sausages, and Mystery Highways
Of Veishnoria and Vogons

1. All hail Veishnoria! In preparation for the Zapad 2017 joint military exercises later in September, the militaries of Russia and Belarus will be facing off against three fictional Western countries called Veishnoria, Vesbaria, and Lubenia. Inhabitants of Western Belarus have gotten creative in response to Veishnoria’s imagined incursion on their territory, some inventing a flag, currency, national anthem, and state seal for the nation, and at least 6,000 applying for a Veishnorian passport.



2. Forget building a highway through the cosmos and paving over Earth, Hitchhiker’s-Guide-to-the-Galaxy style. In the Nizhny Novgorod region, a homeowner returned to her property after spending time in the city and found a spanking new road paved straight across the premises, with half of her house in disrepair or just plain missing. Local administrators are skeptical and say they’ll have to check it out. These days, you’ve got to let Vogons be Vogons.

3. The start to another school year: get ready for math, science, history, and...propaganda? In the Krasnodar region, Russian education officials are requiring schools to hold five-minute information sessions for all students to discuss what they’ve seen on state-run Channel One. Discussion topics include “Glory to Russia,” “News of the Week,” and “We Live in the Kuban.” It may be a good way to learn about current events, but some think it breaches Russia’s law against propaganda in school.

In Odder News

  • What do you get when you mix space travel, technology, and post-Stalinist Russia? Unique and beautiful architecture. Take a look.

  • The latest tool for quieting the opposition: sausages. Plus, they make a great gift. Here’s why the Russian media is abuzz over bratwurst this week.

  • An eternal underground glacier. Medieval relics. A floating bridge. All this and more modern wonders in Moscow’s new Zaryadye Park.

Quote of the Week

“It was difficult not to see it.”
—An official at the local office of Russia’s State Registration Federal Agency, commenting on the visibility of a house that was partially destroyed to build a highway.

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Moscow and Muscovites

Vladimir Gilyarovsky's classic portrait of the Russian capital is one of Russians’ most beloved books. Yet it has never before been translated into English. Until now! It is a spectactular verbal pastiche: conversation, from gutter gibberish to the drawing room; oratory, from illiterates to aristocrats; prose, from boilerplate to Tolstoy; poetry, from earthy humor to Pushkin. 
The Samovar Murders

The Samovar Murders

The murder of a poet is always more than a murder. When a famous writer is brutally stabbed on the campus of Moscow’s Lumumba University, the son of a recently deposed African president confesses, and the case assumes political implications that no one wants any part of.
A Taste of Chekhov

A Taste of Chekhov

This compact volume is an introduction to the works of Chekhov the master storyteller, via nine stories spanning the last twenty years of his life.
Faith & Humor: Notes from Muscovy

Faith & Humor: Notes from Muscovy

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The Moscow Eccentric

The Moscow Eccentric

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Stargorod: A Novel in Many Voices

Stargorod: A Novel in Many Voices

Stargorod is a mid-sized provincial city that exists only in Russian metaphorical space. It has its roots in Gogol, and Ilf and Petrov, and is a place far from Moscow, but close to Russian hearts. It is a place of mystery and normality, of provincial innocence and Black Earth wisdom. Strange, inexplicable things happen in Stargorod. So do good things. And bad things. A lot like life everywhere, one might say. Only with a heavy dose of vodka, longing and mystery.
Turgenev Bilingual

Turgenev Bilingual

A sampling of Ivan Turgenev's masterful short stories, plays, novellas and novels. Bilingual, with English and accented Russian texts running side by side on adjoining pages.
The Little Humpbacked Horse (bilingual)

The Little Humpbacked Horse (bilingual)

A beloved Russian classic about a resourceful Russian peasant, Vanya, and his miracle-working horse, who together undergo various trials, exploits and adventures at the whim of a laughable tsar, told in rich, narrative poetry.
Marooned in Moscow

Marooned in Moscow

This gripping autobiography plays out against the backdrop of Russia's bloody Civil War, and was one of the first Western eyewitness accounts of life in post-revolutionary Russia. Marooned in Moscow provides a fascinating account of one woman's entry into war-torn Russia in early 1920, first-person impressions of many in the top Soviet leadership, and accounts of the author's increasingly dangerous work as a journalist and spy, to say nothing of her work on behalf of prisoners, her two arrests, and her eventual ten-month-long imprisonment, including in the infamous Lubyanka prison. It is a veritable encyclopedia of life in Russia in the early 1920s.
White Magic

White Magic

The thirteen tales in this volume – all written by Russian émigrés, writers who fled their native country in the early twentieth century – contain a fair dose of magic and mysticism, of terror and the supernatural. There are Petersburg revenants, grief-stricken avengers, Lithuanian vampires, flying skeletons, murders and duels, and even a ghostly Edgar Allen Poe.
Russian Rules

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