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Hermitage

September 11, 2013 Dispatches

My friend K. and I traveled to St. Petersburg on the overnight train from Moscow, where I lived then. She had come from New York to visit me. It was December, 1997, and the cold was brutal, but you have to see the Hermitage, I said. So we took the train north and then, at dawn, made our way to the international youth hostel. It was the first one in Russia—opened in 1992—and like every hostel I’d visited, it was full of backpackers eager to tell us how much of the world they had seen. No one’s hostile in a hostel, I said to K. She and I had been out of college for just a couple of years; our fellow travelers were about our age. Many of them were from Australia and New Zealand. At breakfast that first morning— a room with tentative light and forlorn bowls of muesli—we met a young Japanese-Finnish woman. (Her parents were Japanese, but she’d been raised in Finland.) She had traveled from Helsinki, she told us, to photograph corpses.

Changing Places: The New Siberia

January 21, 2013 Essays, In House

By MELODY NIXON

Many Anglo-Westerners think of Siberia in terms of its weather (freezing), its animals (tigers and woolly dogs), its history (gruesome and gulag-filled), or the distances it encompasses (gargantuan). In their conceptions of Russia’s east, twenty-first century writers don’t stray from received stereotypes. Siberia is described in one piece in The Rumpus as the junk drawer below the kitchen radio to which you send unwanted things; in another recent selection of writings “on the near and far,” Siberia is the “far” place, down from which cold winds slither.

Ludwig Josef Johan

November 1, 2011 Issue 02, Issue 02 Poetry, Poetry, Translation

By ARKADY DRAGOMOSHCHENKO

Translated by THOMAS EPSTEIN
Wittgenstein’s been in paradise for a while now. He’s probably delighted
Because the surrounding rustle reminds him
That the rustling that surrounds him does not speak of,
Is not an example of that which must be “shown.”
It’s agonizing, because he can’t remember some sentence.
Upsetting too, because reason is in no condition to “grasp”
The border between absorption and the knowledge of absorption. Erfassen.