New “Transformations”-themed Russian Literature!

Posted on July 07, 2017

We are excited to share two new pieces of literature on the site: “Milgrom,” by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya and translated by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers, and “The Golem in the Mirror,” by Nadezhda Gorlova, translated by Deborah Hoffman.

Of “Milgrom,” Julia Trubikhina, who wrote the introduction to our collection of Russian literature, comments:

The personal transformation of a Soviet Cinderella, a nameless eighteen-year-old girl, into a young woman in a beautiful new dress is, in Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s “Milgrom,” ultimately a way to tell a story of very different transformations, but also of transcendental permanence. . . .

In “The Golem in the Mirror” writes Trubikhina:

. . . the features of a demented and eventually dead Jewish grandmother merge with those of her granddaughter: it’s a Golem that keeps returning, threatening to get out of control. The mechanism of time is broken: a “murky Venetian mirror . . . cracked in two in the fall of 1917,” and as a result, “any face bears a scar and the clocks run backward.”

Let us know what you think!