In his first personal Instagram post since his poisoning, a dazed Navalny sits up in his hospital bed, surrounded by smiling family. He is hunched, his collarbone and ribs visible beneath his gown. This confused man with raised brows recalled Repin’s 1884 portrait of Vsevolod Garshin, a writer who was famously depressed. Even while sitting for his friend Repin, Garshin appears viscerally alone. Navalny does, too.
Continue reading...Pity is weird. We happily extend it to strong figures but we’re stingy with the weak, with actual “victims.”
Continue reading...I pictured myself as the narrator in Tolstoy’s 1889 novella The Kreutzer Sonata. Like me, he feigns sleep to escape a talkative seatmate. Like me, he is failed by this tactic.
Continue reading...As near-daily news articles expose American tech leaders’ unethical business practices and shifts into neoconservativism, we are more in need than ever of creative means for limiting their power. Maybe Russian memers can show us the way.
Continue reading...How does the Airpod-sporting, Tesla-obsessed Ulyanovsk teen compare to Eugene Onegin with a bust of Napoleon in his study?
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