Ukrainian society is closing into “cosy ghettos”, says Serhiy Zhadan – but the writer and activist thinks that there are still ways in which dialogues can be opened up with people in the occupied territories….

Croatian writer and journalist Slavenka Drakulic may be called a communism anthropologist. What she studies is soviet mentality. That may be documenting women’s experience of everyday life in socialism (“How We Survived Communism and Even…

The stories of iconoclasm carried out by artists, and not by religious or ideological censors, come down to us from the time when these acts began to be recorded in artists’ biographies. In a few…

“Let’s talk about the limits of free speech…” somebody nearby says. The host invites guests to call in and between callers launches into a polemic on the attack at the Charlie Hedbo offices. He says…

And if turning to mankind in these days I reveal how like an arrow the century flies And indeed from this band of days Did war take wing some archaic, unspoken glyph? Velimir Khlebnikov Is…