Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is, first, a play—and second, it was written with J. K. Rowling’s involvement, but still not by her alone. Both of those facts affect the way it’s presented. A play doesn’t really need vivid descriptions or direct access to the characters’ thoughts and feelings. You can’t show all that directly on stage; interpretation is the job of a specific director and a specific production. And having two co-writers as well also makes a difference.
Chronologically, the story begins almost exactly where the last novel of the main series ended—where, in the epilogue, we were shown the now-grown-up Harry, Hermione, and Ron seeing their children off to Hogwarts. Among them is Harry’s second son, Albus Severus Potter.
Up to this point, I hadn’t written reviews of any Harry Potter book. I mean, why would I, when tens (if not hundreds) of millions of people have read them already, so everyone knows what they are and what they’re about. But with this play I decided to make an exception.
When I started reading Voskresensky’s Gambit, my wife looked at me like I’d lost my mind. Like, do I really have nothing better to do with my time than read something like this. Because it was obvious that this creation has no documentary value whatsoever.
First, a few words about the author of this “book.” Yuri Voskresensky has been in politics for a long time: he served as a district council member in Minsk’s Pervomaisky District, he was involved in business (there are plenty of questions there too, but that’s not the point), and later he joined Viktor Babariko’s campaign team—until Babariko was arrested on fabricated charges in 2020 and thus removed from the presidential race in the Republic of Belarus.
Yuri Voskresensky himself was arrested as well; he spent some time in the “Amerikanka,” the Belarusian KGB detention facility, and then changed his views and set about building a supposedly democratic and positive opposition under the name “Round Table of Democratic Forces.” He also actively helped (by his own claim) secure the release of several political prisoners (who, in the view of the official Belarusian authorities, are not political prisoners). And the charges against Voskresensky himself were never fully dropped and still haven’t been to this day—which, however, doesn’t stop him from engaging in politics and publishing books that receive glowing reviews in the very first days after publication.
I hesitated for a long time before picking up this book, because I have mixed feelings about Dmitry Glukhovsky, shaped by his Metro series. On the one hand, it’s genuinely a very interesting concept and execution; on the other, while I liked the first novel, Metro 2033, the second—and especially the third—mostly surprised me, and even disappointed me.
And even though I’d heard plenty of feedback about Outpost, I only got around to it after the war with Ukraine began, when almost everyone started saying that Glukhovsky had “seen it all coming” back then. That’s when I got genuinely curious: what exactly was it that Dmitry Glukhovsky supposedly predicted?
The novel opens by showing us a small settlement near a bridge across the Volga, by what used to be Yaroslavl. And now this is the very border of the state. Because at some point, a war broke out in the country, the mutiny was put down, but everything beyond the Volga can no longer be called inhabitable land, since some kind of weapon made it unfit for life. And the people at the outpost on the border are tasked with watching this single route into the cursed lands—just in case, so that no kind of nastiness crawls out of there.
And the lion’s share of the first volume is taken up by a description of life in this settlement—the remnants of all of Yaroslavl, where, judging by the description, only a few dozen residents are left alive, scraping by, somehow living, and even raising children. But the way this everyday grind is described, in my opinion, is drawn out too much. The plot moves very slowly, and all these abundant domestic details feel depressing at first.
Russian history—past, present, and future—is being discussed a lot right now, and in completely different terms. I’m also interested in how exactly we all ended up at the point we’re at now. Boris Akunin wrote an entire series about the history of the Russian state from ancient times all the way up to 1917. Alexander Yanov tried to make sense of the history of the ‘Russian Idea‘. And the blogger and politician Maxim Katz constantly discusses current events, projecting them into the future, while still keeping historical realities in mind.
You can feel differently about Maxim Katz, but he’s definitely a pretty interesting storyteller. I respect his opinion, even though he’s often overly wordy, suffers from heavy self-repetition in his blog, but at the very least he tries to be objective and not lean too hard into emotions (which, for example, I’m very far from always managing).
Recently, Maxim released a book, The History of the New Russia, in which he laid out his view of how the Russian Federation developed starting from the late Soviet Union.
Well, since we’re on a classics streak, after the Soviet Those Who Survive it’s time to talk about Robert A/ Heinlein’s novel Orphans of the Sky.
Originally, the book was written as two separate parts, published independently as novellas in Astounding Science Fiction magazine back in 1941: Universe and Common Sense. Only twenty years later, in 1963, were the two novellas published together as a single work under the title Orphans of the Sky. Russian readers know the book as Stepsons of the Universe, as it was rendered as Stepsons by its first Russian translator, Yuri Zarakhovich.
For Soviet readers, the novel was first published in Zarakhovich’s translation in 1977 (incidentally, the year I was born), serialized across five issues of Vokrug Sveta (Around the World) magazine. I don’t know the exact reason, but for that magazine publication Zarakhovich produced an abridged translation. Nevertheless, it was this version that became the canonical one for many years and continued to be reprinted right up until 2003. Only in 2003 did a complete Russian translation of the novel appear, by Elena Belyaeva and Alexander Mityushkin. Neither of them were professional translators, yet their work still received an award. In addition to restoring the full text, they also slightly revised some terminology that had become “familiar” over decades of reprints of Zarakhovich’s version.
Kir Bulychev is most often regarded as a children’s science-fiction writer. When people hear his name, the first thing that usually comes to mind is the adventures of Alisa Selezneva.
However, Kir Bulychev wrote many works that are anything but children’s literature. Among them, probably the most well-known is the novel Those Who Survive, originally published in Russian under the title Posyolok (The Settlement in English). Initially, Bulychev wrote only the first part of the story, titled The Pass, which was published as a standalone novella in 1980. Only eight years later, in 1988, he wrote the second part, Beyond the Pass, and only then did the book become a single novel known as Posyolok.
The story is built around a spaceship that crashed on a distant planet many years ago. The planet is not exactly hostile; rather, it is simply what an alien world should be — not Earth. It has its own flora and fauna, which were never meant to coexist with humans. As a result, survival is extremely difficult for the crash survivors. The entire world is against them, and after the catastrophe almost none of the technological marvels of the future remain. Those who avoided immediate death are forced to focus solely on survival in this unwelcoming environment — and even that does not always succeed.
Over the years, they have become increasingly primitive in terms of everyday life, yet they have learned how to survive. Children born on this planet know nothing of any other life; they learn about it only through lessons in the small school of the Settlement. Even those who were born before the crash were very young at the time and remember almost nothing of life “before.”
Although by now I’ve realized that calling it just “different dubbings” wasn’t quite accurate. It would have been more precise to call it “different versions.”
3. Rock’n Roll Wolf (1976)
Ever since childhood, I remember those TV “film concerts” — long compilations of songs from various animated films and movies. And almost always, one beautiful song would appear in those programs: “Mama” from the 1976 film of the same name (because in Russian the film was released under the title “Mama”, not “Rock’n Roll Wolf.”). Curiously, the film itself was shown on television quite rarely.
And yet it’s simply a costumed musical (we didn’t even use that word back then), loosely based on the fairy tale The Wolf and the Seven Young Goats (in English it is usually translated as The Wolf and Seven Kids.) At the same time, there was another wonderful Soviet musical, Wolf and Seven Kids in a New Way, which was released both as a vinyl record and as an animated film.
The movie Rock’n Roll Wolf was directed by the Romanian filmmaker Elisabeta Bostan and was a co-production between three countries: the USSR, Romania, and France. The main roles were played by well-known Soviet actors — Lyudmila Gurchenko, Mikhail Boyarskiy, Saveliy Kramarov, Natalya Krachkovskaya, and even the clown Oleg Popov as the Bear — alongside Romanian actors (how famous they were at the time, I honestly don’t know). The screenplay was a Soviet–Romanian collaboration, while the music was written by French and Romanian composers.
In recent years I’ve been reading quite a lot about hiring specialists, and I find it interesting to look at the topic from both sides. I interview candidates myself, and I’m constantly trying to get better at it. At the same time, when reading books about hiring, I always try to recall how I was interviewed, how I behaved as a candidate, and what I liked or disliked about the people doing the hiring.
About a year ago, Alpina released a new book on IT recruitment. I wasn’t familiar with the author, Egor Yatsenko, but the reviews were generally quite positive, so it would have been a shame not to pick it up.
With this kind of literature, though, it’s always important to understand the qualifications of the “trainer.” Egor Yatsenko is the co-founder of the recruitment agency Wanted: Profi, which specializes in hiring for the IT sector. In addition, he’s well known as a frequent speaker at various industry conferences, regularly giving talks, and he’s also involved in teaching sourcing (a professional term that essentially means targeted candidate search across different platforms).
Many people enjoy watching films — some prefer the original audio, others like the dubbing tradition that has existed in the Russian-speaking world for nearly a century. But few people realize that some films were released with multiple different dubbings. The reasons varied, but the fact remains. And today I decided to talk about a few such films — all of them made in the Soviet Union.
In recent years I’ve often come across discussions about what exactly the “Russian idea” is — what Russia’s mission is supposed to be. And with the start of the war in Ukraine, this question began sounding from absolutely everywhere. And suddenly it turned out that there is a major scholarly work by Alexander Yanov devoted specifically to this topic — an attempt to explain what this “Russian idea” actually is, what it consists of, and how it has shaped and continues to shape Russian history.
First, a few words about who Alexander Yanov was. Alexander Lvovich Yanov was a Soviet and later American historian, political scientist, and publicist. Having received a history degree in 1953, he simultaneously began working as a journalist, traveling around the country and writing for many magazines, including Novy Mir, Molodoy Kommunist, and others.
He was deeply interested in Slavophilism, defended a dissertation on it, and later wrote a monumental work on the history of Russian opposition. By his own account, he was essentially pushed out of the USSR, and in 1975 he emigrated to the United States, where he continued developing his favorite subject while teaching at various universities.
For decades he debated (often in magazine columns) many prominent figures — for example, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Alexander Dugin. Many of those polemical texts later became parts of his books.
So the history of the Russian idea, and Slavophilism more broadly, was his core topic for many decades. Between 2014 and 2016, the publishing house Novy Khronograf released his four-volume work The Russian Idea: From Nicholas I to Putin, in which he set out to explain how the very concept of the Russian idea emerged, how it evolved, how it clashed with alternative views, and how all of this influenced the history of the Russian state — and even its neighbors. In the later volumes he increasingly reflected on where the current regime was heading, essentially describing and explaining why Russia rejects the idea of an independent Ukraine.
Yanov died on February 18, 2022 — one week before Russia invaded Ukraine.
