Search Results

“... They are burning memory. They’ve been doing it for a long time . . . I go out of my mind when I think that every night thousands of people throw their diaries into the fire.’ The Soviet writer Yuri Tynianov said this to a colleague in Leningrad in the late 1930s. They were standing at a window looking at the air outside, which was filled with a fine ash ...”

“... Over​ the last thirty years, Karl Schlögel has been the most distinguished flâneur among historians of Russia. A sense of place – both as the setting for human encounters and something that conditions cultural and intellectual life – has informed much of his work. In 1984 he published Moskau lesen, an essayistic exploration of the Soviet capital, while his later books include a history of St Petersburg in the early 20th century which sees the city as a ‘laboratory of modernity’, and a study of Russian-German interactions through the prism of Berlin, which Schlögel christens ‘Europe’s Ostbahnhof ...”

“... democratise perfume and make it available to the people. As far as the Soviet Union is concerned, Karl Schlögel’s book develops themes first raised in his evocative Das sowjetische Jahrhundert: Archäologie einer untergegangenen Welt (2017), but now the history of the Soviet perfume is entwined with a doppelgänger from the capitalist world.French ...”

“... need to look at the Soviet period through the lens of ‘decolonisation’? The German historian Karl Schlögel’s own process of introspection began in 2014, with the annexation of Crimea and the Kremlin’s stoking of rebellion in Donbas, which he describes in the preface to The Soviet Century as the ‘drop that made my cup run over’. Russia’s ...”