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Oleg Ivanov

Oleg Ivanov asks many questions. Sometimes he provides answers.

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Oleg Ivanov

  • AP’s Presence in Jala Towers Calls its Objectivity Into Question

    Since last week, Hamas has launched over 3000 rockets at Israel, causing death and destruction in both Israel and Gaza, where more than 700 of the rockets landed on Hamas’ own civilians. On Saturday May 14, the IDF bombed the Jala Towers, which are owned and operated by Hamas, because Israel claimed it housed the…

  • Purim and Stalin’s Jewish Deportation Plan

    The early months of 1953 were a bad time to be a Jew in the USSR. Less than a decade earlier, the Nazis and their allies had just finished murdering almost 1.5 million Soviet Jews.

  • Advertising Babel: Film Review of “Generation P”

    The new Russian film “Generation P,” based on a novel by Victor Pelevin (one of Russia’s most important contemporary writers), follows the picaresque adventures of Babilen Tatarsky through the booming world of advertising in the early years of post-Soviet Russia. Named after Babi Yar and Lenin, our hero is first seen sporting a sweet mullet…

  • Khodorkhovsky

        In the opening scenes of the new documentary about the world’s wealthiest state prisoner, German filmmaker Cyril Tuschi explains that his ambivalence concerning his subject’s character and political situation was the reason he decided to embark on this project. A dedicated socialist, Tuschi admits that he initially saw Mikhail Khodorkhovsky as the kind of…

  • Family Problems Get Sticky in Russian Jam

     by Oleg Ivanov      Lyudmila Ulitskaya is a major contemporary Russian novelist, short-story writer and screenwriter, the winner of countless international literary awards, and a recognized playwright of some note in her native Russia and much of Europe. While she has been translated into over twenty languages, only about half of her work has been…

  • Why We Resist

    By Oleg Ivanov Recently published in English for the first time, Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone and Hans Keilson’s Comedy in a Minor Key were first released in East Germany and the Netherlands, respectively, in 1947. Among the first novels to deal with those nations’ Resistance movements, they are works of realism based on…

  • Love and Mortality in a Dying Empire

    Super Sad True Love Story, the third novel from New York-based Russian-American writer Gary Shteyngart, is a dystopian romance set against the backdrop of America’s impending economic, political, and social collapse. A relentless satire on our nation’s cultural complacency and financial irresponsibility, Shteyngart envisions an imminent future where Secretary of Defense Rubinstein has embroiled America…

  • The Dispossessed: Pasternak Weeps For His Wolves

    All we have is dispossession. The ability to cast off, to break away, to rupture, this is our true property, the only possession that is entirely our own. It is the expression of our perfect longing for that which lies beyond desire, freedom reflected in an empty mirror, the purest part of ourselves. That alone…

  • The Audacity of Hate: A Review of A Film Unfinished

    There are two kinds of audacity. The first definition given in the New Oxford American Dictionary is “the willingness to take bold risks,” as in The Audacity of Hope. The other is “rude or disrespectful behavior; impudence.” A Film Unfinished, a new “documentary” by Israeli filmmaker Yael Hersonski, is a study of the latter, a…

  • Technological Animism in the Novels of Andrei Platonov

    Issue #798 In his novels, Soviet writer Andrei Platonov effects a conciliation between bodies warped and souls kindled by the revolution, in a manner both satirical and tragic, that celebrates socialism’s promise while conscientiously documenting its failures. Trained as an engineer, his fiction employs Newton’s Third Law of Motion (for every action there is an…