Archive for June 2023

Museums and willful ignorance

When Boris Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his novel Doctor Zhivago, the Soviet press exploded with outrage. The year was 1958, and although Stalin was dead, he had instilled a lingering fear, and despite the liberalizations of his successor, Khruschev, critical portrayals of life in the ussr were still commonly demonized as enemy propaganda. […]