BFFS FOREVER
Big thanks to Eugene Ostashevsky for introducing me to Vasily Kamensky’s immortal “Constantinople”: “a milestone,” as Ostashevsky observes, “in the history of Russian travel writing about Turkey.”
“Constantinople” originally appeared in Ferro-Concrete Poems (1914),“a work… famous primarily for being made entirely of commercially produced wallpaper.”
As for monuments to the love of Turkish people for Russian literature, check out Sabri Gürses’s photo of The Possessed enjoying some well-deserved R&R at Rusburger, right under The Great Chancellor (an early draft of Master and Margarita, published for the first time in 1992).
Turkey and Russia – BFF!! QED!!!
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Tags: comparative literature, food, furniture, hats, photographs of THE POSSESSED in exotic locations, poetry, Russian literature, THE POSSESSED, translation, Turkey, writers
November 17th, 2011 at 6:20 am
First, apologies: I never seem to comment on your posts with anything actually related to the post I’m commenting on!
Second, have you seen the article in The Guardian this week about crime novelist Lindsay Ashford claiming that Jane Austen may have been poisoned to death with arsenic? (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/14/jane-austen-arsenic-poisoning?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+theguardian%2Fbooks%2Frss+%28Books%29)
When I saw it, I immediately thought, “Did Jane Austen die of cancer, or was she MURRRRDERRRED?”
November 21st, 2011 at 5:17 pm
Oh my God, I just read this now and am completely speechless – did you see in the comments section, Jane Austen could have been killed by her own wallpaper?? Death by interior decoration – just like Ivan Ilyich!!!
November 23rd, 2011 at 11:18 am
I had also heard that Austen became pretty cranky in the course of her illness. Just another thing she had in common with Ivan Ilyich, apparently! Chalk it up to that fine line between being possessed by literature and being grouchy about your own prolonged death.