Keith Gessen

“Honestly,” he says, “I judge writers on how they write queries. If you’re a good writer, you’re a good writer.” And if…

— Keith Gessen

“The sanatorium itself was charming, a group of cabins in the woods, a place for overworked urbanites to feel pleasantly melancholic. A…

— Keith Gessen

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

— Keith Gessen

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

— 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…

— 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.…

— 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.…

— Keith Gessen

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

— 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…

— Keith Gessen

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

— Keith Gessen

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

— Keith Gessen

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

— 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…

— Keith Gessen

“She had such control of tone , in her text messages, she was the Edith Wharton of text messaging.”

— Keith Gessen

Bilingualism used to have an undeservedly bad reputation; then it got an undeservedly exalted one.

— Keith Gessen

In the fall of 1963, in Leningrad, in what was then the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the young poet Dmitry Bobyshev…

— Keith Gessen

“You had to be fundamentally stupid , I sometimes thought, to become the sort of academic specialist that hiring committees liked. You…

— Keith Gessen

Astana is a government city, not a tourist city, but all you do is tour it. You tour it in the cab…

— Keith Gessen

Being a Russian oligarch these days isn't easy. The best and brightest of them are in exile or in jail; others, after…

— Keith Gessen

“Fame—fame was the anti-death. But it seemed to slither from his grasp, seemed to giggle and retreat, seemed to hide behind a…

— Keith Gessen

I met with an Automaidan activist who was part of a self-appointed group drafting a lustration law for parliament, which would exclude…

— Keith Gessen

I think that the basement where Orwell washed dishes in Paris was his first lesson in anti-humbug - and part of the…

— Keith Gessen