This essay examines the Russian-language novel Mark Sheider (2009) by the Ukrainian author Dmitrii Savochkin in the context of the classical American and European (Émile Zola, Upton Sinclair, George Orwell), as well as Russo-Ukrainian (Aleksandr Kuprin, Larisa Reisner, Vasilii Grossman, Boris Gorbatov, Fridrikh Gorenshtein) writing about mining. It identifies some topoi common to mining fiction and ...

Top interpreters are rarely able to discuss publicly negotiations between their bosses-cum-clients. Yet the downfall of Nazi Germany and the USSR allowed some interpreters to speak, in interviews and memoirs, without fear of retribution. In the end, only a few told their story, and some did not always tell it correctly, either because of memory lapses or because of a desire to appear more informed ...

Today it often happens that the protagonist in crime fiction is a journalist—for instance, in the globally spread sub-genre of Nordic noir. This article examines what readers can learn about journalism by comparing crime fiction (a widely popular genre fostering society critique) from Russia, Sweden, and USA. These countries with significantly different press traditions have in the post-1991 era ...

This article seeks to rectify two misconceptions that have been following Aleksandr Sokurov’s award-winning sf film Days of Eclipse (Dni zatmeniia; USSR 1988) almost since its release. The first is reflected in the claim that the film – with its odd mix of enigmatic fictional scenes and documentary footage that would not look out of place on a visual anthropology course – is not only difficult ...

This article contributes to two recent discussions in pedagogy and education, namely, the impact of the participatory approach (Jenkins et al., 2009; Yowell & Rhoten, 2009) on learning and the benefits of student active learning (Sokolova et al., in press; Spasova & Welsh, 2020). The participatory approach incorporates texts and tasks on the topics of interest that are relevant to students’ ...

This issue focuses on Russophone cinema in Israel, i.e., films made by and about ex-Soviet Israelis in Israel and elsewhere. Our work on this publication began well before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Even if the current war has little bearing on the articles and reviews that are collected here, it is not at all surprising that this particularly horrifying context leads, ...

A selection of Soviet/Russian and Norwegian documentary and feature films about Svalbard is analysed to account for the recurrent issues raised in cinematic representations of the archipelago. Such issues primarily include Svalbard’s ownership and demilitarization, as well as the role that women – and Russia – play in the region. The subject of these representations’ verisimilitude is also discussed. ...

We propose to look at the 1950s–60s Polish documentaries about Svalbard through the prism of visual geography. We analyse the films by Włodzimierz Puchalski and Jarosław Brzozowski. Svalbard’s landscape appears as a character in these films. The films have not been considered from a geographical viewpoint before, and some of them have not yet been studied at all.