“When he was young, Coba was very fond of hunting, but not with a rifle, he preferred traps,” wrote Leon Trotsky in his essay in 1939. And who could know it better than Trotsky, for whom Coba (a.k.a. Joseph Stalin), his former comrade-in-arms and a close associate at the Politburo, was setting traps all over...
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The Witch
She was a witch, I swear, she was a real witch! —Gogol When my novella, which I was writing obsessively all my senior year at the Academy and a year after that, was accepted by a publisher and I was given a modest advance, I decided to buy myself an apartment. I, of course, didn’t...
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One Day in the Life
When I was 15 years old I read a book that shattered me. The book was called SS im Einsatz (“The SS in Action”). It was a nonfiction book, a 600-page collection of documents—memos, orders, dispatches sent to the units of Waffen-SS, reports from the sonderkommandoes in action in Germany and elsewhere. There were some...
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Digging For Truth in Pravda
I confess—I know Russian. This ability has been causing me a lot of irritation lately. I have been bombarded with questions from people who don’t know the language, about what is really going on in Moscow now. In my answers, in order to be absolutely unbiased, I always rely on “Pravda.” I mean not just...
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Who Was Vladimir Nabokov?
Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) is not one of my most favorite writers, but then my most favorite writers are Pope and Swift, Dante and Corneille, Goethe and Tolstoy (not mentioning Theocritus, Vergil, and Marcus Aurelius) compared to whom any modern writer looks rather like a peculiarly dressed dwarf; however, when Nabokov is accused of some artistic...
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Thoughts On Mikhail Bulgakov
I always think of Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov with tenderness, as if he were my relative, and a very close and dear one at that. Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov was not my relative. I was not even fortunate to know him personally—he died a few years before I was born. Once, in a conversation with the editor...
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A Child’s Joke: A Story
The sea, warm and quiet, lay in front of me. Dusk was falling, and there was a strong smell of brine and kelp in the air. I was sitting on a piece of a ruined ancient column on the shore of the Black Sea and couldn’t quite believe that just a few hours earlier I...