Only a very few stories make you feel that you’ve just returned from a brief trip where only you’ve got the return ticket but the characters and their worlds are left there still living on. One such book is Guzel Yakhina’s Zuleikha. In what seems to be quite a bulky book, but flying away effortlessly,…
I enjoy short stories the best when characters speak with each other, that is when the narration involves exchanging conversations. It feels livelier and engrossing than to plainly describe who said what. Yet, while reading Tatyana Tolstaya’s White Walls: Collected Stories, I realized only towards the end of the book that there’s only a handful…
The minute I think of Soviet poets, my mind reels flashes of revolutions, radical thoughts, and civilian struggles. And the verses are going to heat my blood with empathy, anger, and rebellion. Surprisingly, I bumped into something that stirred me with the same sort of soviet feeling but maybe something of a light-toned version. That’s…
A couple of decades ago, I’d have felt it absurd if someone had talked about Russian women’s works hitting the bestsellers henceforth since Russia could be the most backward in accepting women’s writing as serious literature. Indeed now, with many women writers in vogue and subverting Russian writing trends, I think that Nikolai Gogol’s The…
I’d like you to be a part of my reading journey and get to know along with me the women writers who’ve been silently transfiguring their areas of interest.
Kiruthika Shivashankar