The sanatorium itself was charming, a group of cabins in…

“Honestly,” he says, “I judge writers on how they write queries. If you’re a good writer, you’re a good writer.” And if not, then…

— Keith Gessen

When we started reading books to Raffi, I included some Russian ones. A friend had handed down a beautiful book of Daniil Kharms poems…

— Keith Gessen

In the post-Soviet era, the most interesting work on the Stalinist period has been social history, far beyond the Kremlin walls - the study…

— Keith Gessen

The imputation to Brodsky of Russian nationalist views is, of course, paradoxical and worth considering.

— Keith Gessen

During two decades, on and off, reporting in Russia and the post-Soviet states - in the turbulent '90s, the wealthy but depressing aughts and,…

— Keith Gessen

While I was in Astana, a ballet master from St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theatre staged a performance of 'Giselle' in the opera hall. It was…

— Keith Gessen

To be on the other side of the law-and-order machine in this country is awful. It is dehumanizing and degrading and deforming. It fills…

— Keith Gessen

Left Bank Astana was beautiful at night, each building, it seemed, with its own nighttime color scheme and the street lamps all going full…

— Keith Gessen

All literature has this moral strain, but in Russian literature, it's particularly sharp.

— Keith Gessen

“He was getting to be a certain age, he thought. It was the age when his never-to-be-written masterpieces had begun to outweigh the masterpieces…

— Keith Gessen

One of the best and most challenging books about Orwell is by the socialist literary critic Raymond Williams. As a critic - and, in…

— Keith Gessen

Baba Seva - Seva Efraimovna Gekhtman - was born in a small town in Ukraine in 1919. Her father was an accountant at a…

— Keith Gessen

The government, as a rule, discourages specialization: Military officers and diplomats are constantly transferred from one post to another, from one region to the…

— Keith Gessen

One changes, as a writer, fairly quickly; what you wrote six months or a year ago might not sound right anymore.

— Keith Gessen

My parents and my brother and I left the Soviet Union in 1981. I was six, and Dima was sixteen, and that made all…

— Keith Gessen