Books by Olga Petri
“This is about St. Petersburg at the end of the 19th century and what we would today call LGBT culture, in this specific time and place. It’s mostly about male homosexuality and the way people escaped the attentions of an absolutist monarchy and profited from newly found freedom in the first years of the 20th century. It’s also about the way this very private, very hidden culture influenced the public cultural sphere—because many were cultural figures: writers, dancers, poets, etc. It’s a book about a period that we think we know about because we call it the ‘Silver Age’ culture…It has all the charms of a doomed world. You read about it knowing that in another five or ten years, it will be crushed and completely obliterated out of existence. That is what gives it this specific brightness and visibility that is only given to doomed things.” Read more...
The Best Russia Books: The 2023 Pushkin House Prize
Ekaterina Schulmann, Political Scientist
Interviews where books by Olga Petri were recommended
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1
Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin and Russia’s War Against Ukraine
by Owen Matthews -
2
Russia's War
by Jade McGlynn -
3
Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia
by Natasha Lance Rogoff -
4
Places of Tenderness and Heat: The Queer Milieu of Fin-de-Siècle St. Petersburg
by Olga Petri -
5
Cigarettes and Soviets: Smoking in the USSR
by Tricia Starks -
6
Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling
by Ryan Tucker Jones
The Best Russia Books: The 2023 Pushkin House Prize, recommended by Ekaterina Schulmann
The Best Russia Books: The 2023 Pushkin House Prize, recommended by Ekaterina Schulmann
Since its invasion of Ukraine last year, Russia has been much in the news, with many of us struggling to better understand its politics, history, society and culture. Fortunately, we have the Pushkin House Book Prize, which every year celebrates the best nonfiction written about Russia and available in English. Russian political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann, chair of this year’s judging panel, talks us through the books that made the 2023 shortlist.
