Foreigners gathered under this cover. Some by passport, some by spirit, and some simply too flamboyant for this world. Meryl Streep and Mikhail Baryshnikov, Alla Pugacheva and Jean Cocteau, Vera Polozkova and Greta Garbo. And also Audrey Hepburn, Margarita Terekhova, Andrey Danilko, Renata Litvinova... They have one thing in common: they are ‘different,’ they ‘didn't fit in’—and so they...

Leonid Andreyev’s work continues to spark debate among critics. For some, his writings represent ‘exemplary depravity’; others discern in them ‘a powerful breath of talent.’ But what was the writer truly like—a cold cynic or a sensitive, vulnerable soul? Why, despite being a patriot, did he reject the Revolution? Why did he attempt suicide? The answers lie in this new biography.

The young artist and writer Yevgenia Belorusets was in her hometown of Kyiv when Putin’s ‘special military operation’ against Ukraine began on the morning of February 24, 2022. With the shelling of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa, and Kherson, the war with Russia had clearly, irreversibly begun: ‘I thought, this has been allowed to happen, it is a crime against everything human, against a great common...

Family and nation formed a reliable bedrock of security for precocious 11-year-old Lea Ypi. She was a Young Pioneer, helping to lead her country toward the future of perfect freedom promised by the leaders of her country, the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania. Then, almost overnight, the Berlin Wall fell and the pillars of her society toppled. The local statue of Stalin, whom she had...

A remarkable two-book volume: Diary of A Hunger Striker, the first-hand account of celebrated Ukrainian filmmaker Oleh Sentsov, jailed unfairly as a political prisoner, during his 145-day-long hunger strike in a Russian prison; and Four and a Half Steps, his newest collection of short stories. Sentsov’s prison diary begins three days into his indefinite hunger strike, as he calls for the...