Tuesday, December 30, 2014

American ivory-tower academe-speak about public diplomacy ...


(from a Facebook entry)
American ivory-tower academe-speak:
"As yet, there are few culturally-informed analytical frameworks that can help us speak constructively about observable differences in public diplomacy and appreciate the significance of those differences for communicating in a multi-cultural global arena. Developing a multi-cultural perspective of public diplomacy differs from comparative public diplomacy. In comparative public diplomacy, the public diplomacy may 'look different' compared to others. It is an externally-positioned [JB comment -- OMG] analysis often using a single analytical lens. Several recent comparative studies, for example, use soft power as a lens to discuss public diplomacy. 14
This is an internally-positioned analysis [JB comment -- OMG] that helps create new analytical lenses.15
From a brilliant academic paper (if you can understand what it's all about) on culture and public diplomacy https://www.academia.edu/…/R.S._Zaharna_The_Cultural_Awaken…

See also, from a more mundane perspective,http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/…/is-american-c…

This paper explores the intersection of culture and public diplomacy, looking at where their paths cross and what...
ACADEMIA.EDU
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Blast from the past on Cultural Diplomacy ...
http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/…/is-american-c…

JOHNBROWNNOTESANDESSAYS.BLOGSPOT.COM|BY JOHN BROWN
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Monday, December 29, 2014

Francis Fukuyama: ‘In recently democratised countries I’m still a rock star’



JB: A personal note: Anyone who lived in Eastern/Central Europe in the 1990s (as I had the privilege) was aware that the collapse of communism was not the "end of history," which communism in many ways had "frozen," but the rebirth of history (warts and all).

The world-renowned political thinker on what’s left of ‘The End of History’, the crimes of the neocons and having the ear of the Chinese leadership

Wesley Yang. The Guardian [via  TL on Facebook]

The first volume of Francis Fukuyama’s history of political development has been one of only a handful of books by a foreigner to make a profit in China. As Fukuyama explains when we meet near his home in Palo Alto, California, foreign books in China are usually pirated. But The Origins of Political Order, which narrates the emergence and growth of the state “From Pre-Human Times to the French Revolution”, engages respectfully with Chinese history and culture, and features an overarching version of national history that the Chinese themselves no longer teach or learn. Enough of his account of the country’s enormous historic strengths and equally enormous historic weaknesses survived the censor’s scalpel to make the work valuable to the Chinese reading public.

Fukuyama goes on to say that a friend in Beijing had learned that the Communist party would translate that book’s recently published companion volume, Political Order and Political Decay for publication in a private edition for its senior leadership. “They take the analysis seriously,” he said. The two volumes set out to compare and contrast the progression of various societies across time, in pursuit of a goal he calls “Getting to Denmark”. The proverbial Denmark, like the actual state, is a robust liberal democracy with an effective state constrained by the rule of law – a package “so powerful, legitimate, and favourable to economic growth that it became a model to be applied throughout the world”.

As he describes his reception in China, Fukuyama beams with pride that the authorities regard him as sufficiently impartial to take notice of, especially as he is perhaps the person most closely identified with the espousal of the victory of western liberal democracy over all its ideological competitors. Fukuyama became an unlikely intellectual celebrity back in 1989 when he declared that the defeat of the USSR in the cold war represented not “the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” To have written a book 25 years later that the Communist party elite in Beijing feels compelled to make compulsory reading is a feat plainly gratifying to its author and ensures that his stern and chastening message will have been received by at least one of the audiences to whom it is addressed.

His book makes clear the fundamental debility of a political system lacking upward accountability, as the still nominally communist Chinese system does. But it also emphasises the dangers of the improper sequencing of different elements of political development: too much rule of law too soon can constrain the development of an effective state, as happened in India; electoral democracy introduced in the absence of an autonomous administrative bureaucracy can lead to clientelism and pervasive corruption, as happened in Greece. Even the societies in which a proper balance of democracy, rule of law and an effective state has been struck in the past are susceptible to political decay when rent-seeking extractive elite coalitions capture the state, as has happened in the US. The failure of democratic institutions to function properly can delegitimise democracy itself and lead to authoritarian reaction, as happened in the former Soviet Union.

“They understand that their system needs fundamental political reform,” Fukuyama says of the Chinese. “But they don’t know how far they can go. They won’t do what Gorbachev did, which was take the lid off and see what happens. But whether it will be possible to spread a rule of law to constrain state power at a pace that will satisfy the growing demands of the rising middle class is also unclear. There are 300 to 400 million Chinese in the middle class; that number will rise to 600 million in a decade. I had a debate a few years ago with an apologist for the regime. I pointed out that in many regions of the world when you develop a sufficiently large middle class, the pressure for increased political participation becomes irresistible. And the big question for China is whether there will be a point at which its people will push for greater participation, and he said: ‘No, we’re just culturally different.’”

It was, in effect, a rehash of the old “Asian values” argument concerning the hierarchical and deferential social ethic that goes by the name of Confucianism in east Asia – allegedly the reason that Asians lacked the impulse to individual self-assertion that resulted in the demand for self-government in other parts of the world. The democratic transitions in South Korea and Indonesia put an end to that argument decades ago, Fukuyama says, just as the Arab spring debunked a parallel claim regarding Arabs. This is the part of Fukuyama’s argument about the end of history that he still stands behind without reservation or qualification – the Hegelian philosophical anthropology that saw history as the working out of the struggle between masters and slaves for recognition. “I really believe that the desire for recognition of one’s dignity and worth is a human characteristic. You can see manifestations of this in all aspects of human behaviour cross-culturally and through time.”

The relevant historical analogue for the Chinese rulers, Fukuyama says, is probably Prussia under a series of enlightened monarchs, which allowed a rule of law to spread gradually without extending democratic participation to the people. But, of course, Germany came to the “end of history” after initiating and fighting two of the most brutal wars the world had ever seen.

Would the next rising power be able to control the titanic energies of its people and manage a transition that avoids the blood-letting Europeans had to endure? Political Order and Political Decay emphasises the enormous difficulty of implanting democratic political institutions in places where the state has collapsed, or where it never really took root in the first place. For Fukuyama, the great challenge of state-building is creating and sustaining an institution of collective rule that cuts against the grain of human nature: we are designed to favour friends and family, and a patrimonial tribal order is “hard-wired”, he argues, into our neural circuitry. Though the right set of institutions can allow us to override these instincts, we naturally revert to them whenever political order breaks down. The first volume of his book recounts the expedients to which the first modern states resorted to overcome tribalism – it discusses the eunuchs who administered the Chinese state, the kidnapped Christian slaves who ran the Egyptian state – and the historical accidents that allowed state, society and rule of law to reach an equilibrium favourable to modern political order in western Europe. The second volume demonstrates how vulnerable even the best-developed modern state apparatus is to “repatrimonialisation”. Both volumes emphasise that the state is an institution that feeds on war, one whose national stability has often been buttressed by ethnic cleansing; and that the European Union after 1945, for instance, was built atop a pile of mass graves.

In some ways, Fukuyama says, he has been “trapped” by the ideological cul-de-sac in which his claims regarding the “End of History” have placed him. Though he still stands behind the assertion that liberal democracy is the eventual destination of history, he has qualified his argument and narrowed the scope of his ideological triumphalism, postponing the arrival of liberal democracy to the indefinite “long run”. He would not, he tells me, use the same heightened rhetoric today that he used in 1989 to describe what he now calls a “historically contingent demand for greater political participation” that ensues as people become more prosperous and educated.

Fukuyama’s career as a public intellectual began with an essay that promised to distinguish between “what is essential and what is contingent or accidental in world history”. His own career, as he makes clear to me, was almost entirely a series of accidents. He took up ancient Greek under the influence of his charismatic freshman year teacher Allan Bloom, who inculcated him into the ideas of the emigre German philosopher Leo Strauss, and to a network of aspiring young intellectuals that included men who would figure prominently in his later career, Paul Wolfowitz and I Lewis “Scooter” Libby. There was a detour into the modish French philosophers of the day, as part of which he made a pilgrimage to Paris (where he also wrote a novel) to study with Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes. But he soon concluded, while enduring an interminable session in which Barthes would riff, pun and free associate over random sequences of words pulled from the dictionary, that “this was total bullshit, and why was I wasting my time doing it?”

He applied to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government to study national security. While the French post-structuralists and their epigones would go on to dominate American literature departments in the 1980s, his new cohort at the Kennedy School would populate the State Department and Pentagon. And in a remarkable turn of events, Fukuyama’s old mentor Bloom would become a bestselling intellectual celebrity with The Closing of the American Mind, two years before Fukuyama’s own ascent to global fame.

“The End of History?” began as something of a recondite joke. Fukuyama was at the time a mid-level figure in the Reagan State Department witnessing the rapid unravelling of the Soviet mystique. “I remember there was a moment when Gorbachev said that the essence of communism was competition, and that’s when I picked up the phone, called my friend and said, ‘If he’s saying that, then it’s the end of history.’” Fukuyama is careful to point out that the coinage was not of his own making, but instead that of a Russian émigré professor named Alexander Kojève whose seminars on Hegel influenced postwar French existentialism.

But the triumphal eulogist of America at its world historical apogee never fell victim to the crude simplification of his own argument to which his neoconservative friends fell prey – and which his own rhetoric had done so much to invite. As he would later write in a 2006 book repudiating the neoconservativism of his youth, the misreading of the events of the 1989 led directly to the calamities of the early 21st century that, in his view, have forever discredited the neocon approach to the world. “There was a fundamental misreading of that event and an ensuing belief that if America just did what Reagan had done, and stood firm, and boosted military spending, and used American hard power to stand up to the bad people of the world, we could expect the same moral collapse of our enemies in all instances.” Fukuyama continues to credit Bloom and Strauss with broadening his intellectual horizons, but the adventure the adherents of those neocon thinkers embarked on, culminating in armed intervention in Baghdad, was, Fukuyama says, a bloody fiasco. “I don’t know how they can live with the consequences of their actions.”

Fukuyama has always been an intellectual comfortable with his proximity to power, conceiving of his role as offering guidance to the organs of the American national security state, starting with his first job at the Rand corporation in the late 1970s. He has never indulged the romance of the adversary intellectual who sees the working of that system as irremediably corrupted. He showed me the cover of a recent issue of Foreign Affairs carrying an excerpt of Political Order and Political Decay whose headline announces “America in Decay”, and indicated his discomfort with broadcasting a message that would give comfort to America’s geopolitical adversaries.

It is one index of the state of American politics when a man of such impeccably centrist instincts feels impelled to assert, as Fukuyama has done, that the US has become an oligarchy, and to lament the absence of a leftwing popular movement able to check the excesses of that oligarchy. He insists that he was right in the 1970s and 1980s to oppose the expansion of the welfare state, and to support the muscular use of American power around the globe during a time of retrenchment. But the pendulum has swung far in the other direction. “What I don’t understand is my friends on the right who don’t think it’s necessary to rethink their ideas in light of subsequent events.”

“I think where I’ve had my biggest and most positive audience is in recently democratised countries – Ukraine, Poland, Burma and Indonesia,” he says. “In places like that, I’m still a rock star. In places like that, the End of History writings allowed people to see themselves as a broad historical movement. It wasn’t just their local little disputes, there were deeper principles involved. And to be able to go to those places and tell them that they are on the right side of history with regard to political change – to this day I’m touched by it. To be able to go to Kiev and tell people there that democracy still remains the wave of the future – it’s in those moments that I feel most fully that I’ve made and am making a lasting contribution.”

Sunday, December 28, 2014

Presentation by Ambassador Robert R. Gosende on the U.S. Foreign Sevice and Russian-American relations




Presentation at Kendal, Sleepy Hollow, December 8, 2014

I believe that we agreed that I would speak this evening about the Foreign Service of the United States, most especially in regard to the appointment of Ambassadors and other senior officials of the Department of State, and then about the current state of relations with the Russian Federation since its annexation of Crimea and outbreak of hostilities between Russia and Ukraine. Each of these subjects could occupy much more time that we have this evening so I will try to be brief. I am very anxious to hear your views in our discussion period.

The U.S. Foreign Service:

I have prepared copies of the “President’s Views” from the latest issue of the Foreign Service Journal, the monthly publication of the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), which is the professional association of American Foreign Service Officers. President Robert J. Silverman, as you will see from his article, describes how non-career appointees, perhaps better labeled political appointees, have increased in numbers among the middle ranks of the U.S. Department of State. Mr. Silverman is a Career Foreign Service Officer. He is on leave from the Foreign Service position while he serves full-time as the AFSA President. He has to maintain good working relations with the Department of State’s management team, most of whom are political appointees so he has to be careful with his words. What he does not speak about in this article is the increased number of political officer nominees that have been put forth as prospective Chiefs of Mission or Ambassadors by President Obama. raditionally, political appointees have constituted 30% of Ambassadorial appointments. During President Obama’s first term 35 % of his nominees for ambassadorships were non-career individuals. During his second term that number has risen to 41%.

The following are the countries or organizations to which President Obama has nominated political appointees: The African Union, Argentina (Noah Mamet – Congressional staffer for former Congressman Richard Gephardt and also long-time Democratic political activist and consultant in California), the association of South East Asian Nations, Australia, Austria, the Bahamas, Belgium, Belize, Burma, Cambodia, Canada, China (former Senator Max Baucus who said at his confirmation hearing, “I am no expert on China”), Costa Rica, the Czech Republic, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, the European Union – Brussels, Finland, France/Monaco, Germany, the Vatican (Rome), Hungary (Colleen Bell – Producer of the Bold and the Beautiful), the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO Montreal, Canada), Iceland, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy/San Marino, Japan (Caroline Kennedy), Luxembourg, Mexico, Morocco, the North Atlantic Treaty organization (NATO – Brussels), the Netherlands, Norway (George Tsunis – New York Hotelier), the Organization of American States (Washington, DC), the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD – Vienna, Austria), Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, the Slovak Republic, South Korea, Sweden, Tanzania, Trinidad and Tobago, the United Kingdom, the United Nations, the UN Economic and Social, Human Rights (Geneva), Management, and Political Affairs Committees in New York City, and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome and UNESCO in Paris, and finally Uruguay. Please note that most ambassadorships in Western Europe have gone to political appointees. I should also mention that all but one of the eight most senior officials at the Department of State in Washington are political appointees. Many of the people who have received such appointments contributed substantial amounts of money to President Obama’s political campaigns.

The practiced of awarding diplomatic posts to non-career appointees should be halted immediately. We are critical of other countries which undertake such practices. The conduct of our diplomacy is a deadly serious business. It should be managed and implemented by people who have spent their lives learning the trade. In the relatively rare circumstances when someone from outside the career service of our country has the expertise and the confidence of the President necessary to undertake a mission on behalf of our country, that person should certainly be appointed. But as a regular practice, the appointment of Ambassadors should not be made as a reward for political contributions as is the case in too many instances now. Continuing to do so leads other nations to believe that e do not consider diplomacy to be really important.

Russia:

We are now well into a debate over who is responsible for what has happened in our relationship with Russia. We always need to find someone to blame when something goes wrong. And, of course, the easiest target is our own administration. This has happened on President Obama’s watch. The President is responsible for the conduct of our foreign relations. So, he must be to blame.

But that may be too easy by half, so to speak.

People engaged in this debate occupy, in general, two points of view:

Those who contend that it is our own fault for the way in which we treated Russia, expanding NATO into former Soviet space in the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union and those who believe that it was only normal that countries which emerged from Soviet domination in Central and Eastern Europe would seek security guarantees from NATO in light of past Russian/Soviet behavior.

Perhaps the most ardent proponent of the view that Russia was maltreated after the collapse of the Soviet order is Prof. John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago. Mearsheimer says that the West (meaning the U.S. and our Western European allies) is responsible for what has happened in Crimea and Ukraine. He argues that throughout its history Russia has always been highly sensitive about foreign military powers encroaching on its borders and that we should have realized that it would eventually react negatively to the enlargement of NATO to include virtually all Central European countries and the Baltic States (Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia).

Those who argue that the expansion of NATO into Central Europe and the Baltic State was certainly to be expected given Soviet Russia’s forcible occupation of this region following World War II, believe that Russia, specifically the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, is responsible for the events in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. Our country’s foremost Kremlinologist, Prof. George Kennan, warned in 1998, as Poland Hungary and Czechoslovakia were about to be brought into NATO, that Russia would react unfavorably to the expansion of NATO. And in this Prof. Kennan was undoubtedly correct.

Russian President Putin annexed Crimea last summer and he has sent armed Russian troops along with sophisticated Russian weaponry over the border between Russia and Eastern Ukraine. He claims variously: that Ukraine is not a “real” country, that it has always been part of Russia, and that it lays within Russia’s “sphere of influence.”

There is no doubt about the close relationship between Russia and Ukraine. Russian civilization first appeared in Kiev, which is now the capitol of Ukraine over 1000 years ago. There has always been extensive intermarriage between Russians and Ukrainians. The late, distinguished Harvard political theorist, Prof. Samuel Huntington, in his 1996 book Clash of Civilizations, described Ukraine as a “torn State.” Prof. Huntington said that Ukraine was divided north/south along the Dnieper River between those eastern Ukrainians who looked to Russia and western Ukrainians who looked toward Europe with Crimea appended at the bottom where people really considered themselves Russian.

Recently President Putin has called for assurances from the U.S. and Western Europe that Ukraine will ever be allowed to join NATO.

This past month Russia shut down the FLEX Program (Future Leader Exchange Program) which had, over the past 21 years, brought over 6,000 Russian high school students to study in the U.S. while living with U.S. families.

Last week the Putin administration said that it was “reassessing” funding for graduate study by Russian students in the U.S. and other western countries.

One prominent Russian Parliamentarian, Valery Seleznov, expressed concerns about the loyalty of Russians who study abroad saying, “For our money we will get highly-skilled agents of foreign espionage services who will know the weak spots of our economy better than anyone and who will develop sanctions that three years from now the dollar will cost 500 rubles.” It appears that Russia will no longer provide funding to its own students to study in the West. But is it really to be believed that exchange students are responsible for the devaluation of the ruble?

President Putin said in his recent State of the Nation speech that the West is guilty of “pure cynicism” over Ukraine. However, if he really believed that Russia was unfairly taken advantage of in the denuclearization negotiations in 1995, when Russia promised to respect Ukraine’s borders including Crimea, the door was open to him to seek a peaceful resolution to this alleged mistreatment. But he eschewed peaceful options.

How is it that President Putin has, seemingly at least, been able to get a very large majority of the Russian people to go along with this behavior? Russia emerged from World War II on the winning side though at the outset of that conflict it was allied with Nazi Germany under the terms of the Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact which called for Nazi Germany to invade Poland from the west while the Soviet Union invaded from the east. The two invaders quickly divided Poland between them. But then Hitler thought better of this and attacked Soviet Union in 1941. The U.S. and Allied Western European nations quickly accepted the Soviet Union as a military partner against the Nazis. We were anxious to have the Soviets join the fight against Hitler to minimize American casualties and shorten the war. However, this was an uneasy alliance against the backdrop of the Stalinist purges of the 1930’s and the alliance with Hitler in 1939.

So Russia emerged from the war on the winning side. The Soviet Union participated in the occupation of Germany and occupied most of Central Europe including East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, with Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia remaining under Soviet domination, while Yugoslavia managed to remain outside direct domination when Marshall Josip Broz Tito established his own communist dictatorship. In the words of Winston Churchill, “an iron curtain rang down across Europe.

The reconstruction of Germany and Japan after World War II are the most successful examples of nation building in the history of mankind. Both in Japan and Germany, the occupying powers went to considerable lengths to educate the population, especially the younger generation, about what had led up to the war. And careful attention was paid to the form of government that would be established on the road back to independence and the withdrawal of occupying forces. Japan and Germany had to reexamine the history of the 20th Century and their role in that history.

No such reexamination has gone on in the Russian Federation. Many Russian people remember Stalin as a grandfatherly figure that saved Russia from defeat at the hands of the Nazis. And there has been no serious effort to educate the younger generation about Russia’s 20th century history before the outbreak of World War II. Russians know little about the Stalinist purges of the 1930’s. The one Communist Party First Secretary during the Soviet era who attempted this, Nikita Khrushchev, is the only Party First Secretary buried outside the Kremlin wall, the hallowed final resting place for former Party First Secretaries.

President Putin has said that he regards the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. This is certainly not how people in Central Europe remember the Soviet era. And, in particular, there are many Ukrainians who clearly recall how their people suffered during the Stalinist purges

So what should our country be doing now? I majored in history in college so perhaps I am biased toward thinking that people really need to know their history. There is no easy or quick answer but certainly it is important now that we do everything we can to strengthen our relationship with countries across the whole of Europe including Russia. Particularly important now are international educational and cultural exchange programs which focus on the next generation of leaders. We should make it clear, most especially, to the Russian people that our door is open to Russian students to come to our schools and universities. Special focus is needed now to emphasize the study of history, literature and languages – those subjects that will help people to understand one another. This intensified exchange effort should be a two-way street with American students studying abroad as European students come to the U.S. We should also initiate joint international textbook writing and publishing efforts which include the exchange of scholars who will participate in such efforts. This new initiative should certainly include scholars and students in the plastic and performing arts and film.

Thanks for your attention and I look forward to our discussion.

We of course must honor our treaty commitments within NATO. And it is hard to imagine in today’s world that any country can any longer have a “sphere of influence.” We all live now in an interrelated world within which we need to relate to one another peacefully. This automatically means that we need to pay greater attention to the role of international organizations – both regional and the United Nations. These efforts will take time and patience to establish but if we find seriousness of purpose, meaning adequate funding and clear leadership from our President and the Congress, the ball will be clearly in the Russian court. It will be difficult for President Putin to repudiate working with young people, young Russians and young Americans, to enable them to avert mistakes from the past.


Moscow metro opens virtual library of Russian classical literature

Well, ok, we 'Merikans do quote Walt Whitman; his verse on victims of the Civil War is etched on the escalator walls of the Dupont Circle Station station
in downtown D.C. But the lines are unattributed ...

From The Guardian

Novels by Pushkin, Chekhov and Tolstoy available for free download by commuters




Novoslobodskaya metro station on the Moscow metro, one of the most heavily used underground transport systems in the world. Russia
 Novoslobodskaya metro station on the Moscow metro, one of the most heavily used underground transport systems in the world. Photograph: Linda Nylind

Its design is already hailed as a masterpiece of modern art, now Moscow’s metro system is increasing its cultural credentials by opening a virtual library of Russian classical literature.
More than 100 canonical Russian books have been made available for commuters to download for free on train platforms, where scanning a code with a smartphone or tablet allows users to browse the library’s virtual shelves.
The selection, which includes novels by Russian giants such as Pushkin, Chekhov and Tolstoy, will be available to the 2,490 million passengers travelling on the metro each year. A similar project has already been run on 700 of the city’s buses, trams and trolleybuses.
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“The idea is excellent,” said 37-year old Tanya Kerekelitsa. ”It’s so convenient to use on the metro because you don’t need to register. The choice is still pretty limited for now, but if they can add some modern or foreign authors, it will be just great. I’d even be willing to pay a little bit of money.”
The full library service is already online, but the project is currently only being advertised in a few of Moscow’s 195 metro stations for a trial run, before being rolled out city-wide.
Muscovites are being encouraged to suggest new books to add to the collection – if you have a suggestion tell us in the comments below. 
Moscow’s commuters are no strangers to high culture, with previous projects including the installation of miniature art galleries on underground trains. The latest digital aspect is set to coincide with the installation of free wifi on all metro carriages by the end of 2014.
The electronic takeover however, is not to everyone’s taste. “I prefer paper books,” said 35 year-old politics teacher Ilya Chipiga, “but everyone likes different things. You can’t keep everyone happy.
“Some people will like these serious, classic books, some people won’t. The main thing really is to just get people reading.”




Dostoyevskaya metro station in Moscow, named after the writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
 Notes from the underground: Dostoyevskaya metro station, named after the writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky.Photograph: Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images

Selected works

  1. The Lady with a Dog - Anton Chekhov
  2. About Love - Anton Chekhov
  3. The Days of our Lives - Leonid Andreyev
  4. Travels around Crimea - Mikhail Bulgakov
  5. Nose - Nikolai Gogol
  6. Nevsky Prospect - Nikolai Gogol
  7. The Artamonov Business - Maxim Gorky
  8. Mr Prokharchin - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  9. Egyptian Nights - Alexander Pushkin
  10. Yevgeny Onegin - Alexander Pushkin
  11. Master and Man - Leo Tolstoy
  12. Smoke - Ivan Turgenev