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Historian Gives The Real Story Of The Death Of Stalin – And Argues That A Film Comedy About It Was A Bad Idea

Richard Overy points out where Armando Ianucci’s new The Death of Stalin gets the history wrong but allows that cinematic license could be legitimate. But the caricature, he writes, is just wrong, and not only because Stalin’s victims deserve better: “The presentation of Stalin and his cronies as a collection of foul-mouthed misfits … will certainly not help to understand the Russia of the 1950s while it mocks by implication the Russia of today, a country still shaped in some ways by the legacy of Stalin’s modernisation drives and the operation of the Stalinist state.”

Thousands Of Languages Are Dying. A New Project Aims To Save Their Poetry Before It Falls Silent

“Languages are dying out at an astonishing rate: a language is being lost every two weeks. And each of those languages has a poetic tradition of some sort, whether it’s written or aural – within that poetry will be all the different approaches and styles of writing poetry, as well as everything that poetry can tell us about those people: what they’re interested in; what their concerns are.”

Did Kenneth MacMillan Revolutionize British Ballet Or Ruin It?

“By reputation, Kenneth MacMillan was the dark genius of British ballet – its destroyer, if you listen to some. They think this country’s classical ballet reached its pinnacle under the Apollonian hand of Frederick Ashton, before MacMillan stomped in with his working-class neuroses and rape simulations and took ballet down to the psychological underworld.” Ismene Brown looks at his body of work – especially the little-performed short ballets – in this 25th anniversary year of his death.

After Four Years Off, Mabou Mines Revives Itself And Gets A New (Old) Theater Of Its Own

The 50-year-old company, a legend of the late 20th-century downtown avant-garde theater scene, is back at the old P.S. 122 building, just renovated, in Manhattan’s East Village. Reporter Zachary Small visits the new Mabou Mines HQ and talks with co-artistic director Sharon Fogarty and company co-founder Lee Breuer, who – at age 80 – is premiering a new play there.

When Nazis Hired Jewish Intellectuals To Assemble A Yiddish Archive, The Scholars Hid The Best Stuff (Which Is Now Found)

“In one of their odder and more chilling moves, the Nazis occupying Lithuania once collected Yiddish and Hebrew books and documents, hoping to create a reference collection about a people they intended to annihilate. Even stranger, they appointed Jewish intellectuals and poets to select the choicest pearls for study.”

Sam Shepard’s Final Work To Be Published In December

The novel Spy of the First Person, on which the playwright/actor began working just after he was diagnosed with ALS (of which he died in July) and which his daughters and his old friend Patti Smith helped him complete, is “the story of an unnamed narrator who retraces the memories of his life as he undergoes treatment for a medical condition that renders him dependent on the loved ones who are caring for him.”

Two Picasso Murals And The Anders Breivik Bombing Make For A Bitter Battle In Oslo

A few hours before right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik shot 69 people dead at a summer camp outside the Norwegian capital in 2011, he left a car bomb in the city’s government district that killed eight and severely damaged two landmark Brutalist buildings which have been empty ever since. Now the Norwegian government plans to tear down and replace one of those buildings and relocate its two murals, created by Pablo Picasso with Carl Nesjar. “Opponents of the decision see it as an affront to Norwegian and global artistic heritage, and a capitulation to Mr. Breivik.” Says one official, “We don’t want the ministry to tear down the building when the terrorist didn’t manage to do that.”