I’ve started reading Yuri Annenkov’s 1934 novel Повесть о пустяках [A story about trifles], set in Russia in the first couple of decades of the century; it was looked on with disfavor by almost everyone, because not only did it use suspiciously modernist devices (montage, ornamental prose, etc.), but the “trifles” are two revolutions, WWI, […]