The editors of "Shelf" Varvara Babitskaya, Lev Oborin, Polina Ryzhova and Yuri Saprykin discuss what Russian literary megalomania is . How are texts of large volume and ambitions of a planetary scale connected? How did literature, trying to explain the world, come to the need to change it?
Varvara Babitskaya, Lev Oborin, Polina Ryzhova and Yuri Saprykin talk about Russian classical literature . They say Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are boring, boring, it's a "dusty yesterday"; it's not for us and not about today? Is it possible to make interesting old books that are boring?
Gathered on a winter evening in the hospitable library of Nekrasov, the editors of the "Polka" discussed the role of snow and cold in literature . From Russian fairy tales and Christmas stories to four Snowstorms (Pushkin, Tolstoy, Pasternak and Sorokin), from the poems of Blok and Brodsky to conspiracy investigations about the Dyatlov Pass.