“You had to be fundamentally stupid , I sometimes thought, to become the sort of academic specialist that hiring committees liked. You had to be thick somehow. You had to block out all the other things in the world to… — Keith Gessen Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“The sanatorium itself was charming, a group of cabins in the woods, a place for overworked urbanites to feel pleasantly melancholic. A slackertorium.” — Keith Gessen Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
The imputation to Brodsky of Russian nationalist views is, of course, paradoxical and worth considering. — Keith Gessen Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
All literature has this moral strain, but in Russian literature, it's particularly sharp. — Keith Gessen Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Baba Seva - Seva Efraimovna Gekhtman - was born in a small town in Ukraine in 1919. Her father was an accountant at a… — Keith Gessen Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
One changes, as a writer, fairly quickly; what you wrote six months or a year ago might not sound right anymore. — Keith Gessen Copy Share Image
