Bradley Gorski is a doctoral student in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University, where he works on contemporary Russian literature.
Bradley Gorski
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Writing on Public Books
Totalitarian Sprawl
Was the Soviet Union a totalitarian state, ruled by a highly centralized power and demanding absolute subservience from its citizens? Or was it instead a more complex polity, one that only projected a tempting illusion of homogeneity? This has been a central debate in the historiography of the Soviet era since the fall of the […]
The Other Side of the Looking Glass
The absent original—a lost “authentic” text, accessible only through its corrupted traces—occupies a central place in the postmodern imagination. Often at the very core of novels, the image of an endlessly elusive source text works double duty: it grants a fictional world intertextual legitimacy, while simultaneously opening a void at its center. Andrei Bitov’s latest […]
Russia Is No More
The future of Europe recedes far into the past, into a medieval world where Russia no longer exists—at least according to Vladimir Sorokin’s latest sci-fi marvel, Telluria (published in Russian in 2013, not yet translated into English). Sorokin, the bad boy of Russian letters, is one of the country’s most talked-about writers. His trademark blend […]
