This issue of the magazine includes:

• Memoirs: Sarnov and Slutsky

Petersburg historian Boris Frezinsky publishes excerpts from his polemical correspondence with prominent literary scholar Benedikt Sarnov, who recently passed away in Moscow. The major subject of the letters is Sarnov’s work on a volume of selected poems by Soviet Russian poet Boris Slutsky (1919–1986). The epistolary dialogue, which begins with rather technical issues (which poems to include into the book), gradually evolves into a deep and emotional discussion of the ideological tragedy and duality of Slutsky, who distressingly tried to combine a sincere Marxism with a rejection of the totalitarian system. As Sarnov argues, “It was Slutsky’s ideological tragedy, the dualism of his personality, the collapse of his worldview, and his long attempts to gain a foothold in its ruins that made him the most important Russian poet of the latter part of the twentieth century.”

• Looking through Russian Literary Magazines: Novels and Articles of Jewish Interest

Among various materials published in Russian literary magazines recently, the reviewers give special attention to a new novel by Oleg Yuriev, a poet and prose writer originally from Saint Petersburg who now lives in Germany, and an extensive article by Mikhail Krutikov, a scholar from the University of Michigan, who analyzes the problem of Jewish memory in the writings of three modern Russian authors—Alexander Goldstein, Alexander Ilichevsky, and Yuriev.

• Jewish Calendar of Significant Dates: November–December 2014

• Bibliography: 70 New Books