New Birth

NPR’s Gregory Feifer files a short piece about what he calls a ‘literary renaissance’ in Russia.  Readers have not been seduced by the availability of commercial literature after the fall of the Soviet Union and, in fact, are drawn to serious literature now, under Putin’s repressive regime.

Kind of puts me in mind of that line by Harry Lime in The Third Man: “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”