The Monthly Digest: May 2020

In October 2019, Rebecca Reich, the Consultant Editor for Russia and East-Central Europe at the Times Literary Supplement, praised LARB in that publication, focusing on one of our strengths: “These days I mostly watch Russia from afar, but the internet makes up for distance[.] In English, the Los Angeles Review of Books offers fresh views on Russia and Eastern Europe.” In April we stayed true to that part of our mission, offering fresh, sometimes contrarian, views on the great Russian authors Leo Tolstoy and Nikolai Gogol; historian Geoffrey Hosking’s essay on a vivid and vigorous new translation of a Soviet classic, Alexander Tvardovsky’s Vasili Tyorkin: A Book about a Soldier; a clear-eyed and lyrical consideration of the second volume of Varlam Shalamov’s harrowing Kolyma Stories; a report on a recent boom in English translations of Yiddish women’s writing; a balanced and deeply informer review of a book on Holocaust remembrance after Communism; a lively memoir of a cholera quarantine in Ukraine in 1975; and pieces on two classic Czech authors — one of whom wrote in German. — LARB Editorial