Down and Out in Paris and Berlin

January 30, 2013 10:20 AM

Russians without Russia is an elegantly designed digital archive of the magazines and newspapers produced by the Russian exile communities of 1920s and 30s.
posted by Horace Rumpole (12 comments total)

Having just finished the first half of a biography of Vladimir Nabokov, I can't pull myself away from this post, though I can't read Russian.

I should learn Russian.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 10:42 AM on January 30, 2013

Lovely stuff, thanks. I'm forwarding this to the lovely people who taught me Russian at University.
posted by ZipRibbons at 11:08 AM on January 30, 2013

Prefaced of course by Lenin's exile in Switzerland during the Great War (elegantly described by Solzhenitsyn in Lenin in Zurich). After the revolution, it was the whites who were sent packing, so these are the journals of the enemies of the working class.
posted by three blind mice at 11:22 AM on January 30, 2013

Russia Illustrated, issue 1, page 5: a catalogue of New Year's gifts.

1. A football. Marked "France-Belge." A useful thing for training frontier teams.
2. Peace pipe in fancy case. Case: 100 ₣. Pipe: crooked sixpence.
3. Toy factory.
4. Toy timesheet for the same. Completely free!
5. Neckerchief with lucky horseshoes tied in a fashionable manner.
6. A woman sliced into pieces, in fancy box case. A learning game for children.
7. Fashionable fabric and a folder marked "personal file" for putting under the fabric. Prices vary based on quality.
8. Fashionable bracelets and chains. A wide selection in our jewelry department.
9. Kitchen knives, revolvers, and other common household objects.
10. A map of Paraguay. For those who like to bet everything.
11. Mechanized tank and
12. Biplane bomber, special issue coinciding with the 500th meeting of the League of Nations.
13. Various amusing masks.
14. Supplies for making soap bubbles. Made in the USSR, guaranteed by the Foreign Commerce Department for 5 years.
15. Toy soldiers. Made in the USSR, no warranty.
16. Almanac, 1914–1917.
17. Emigré. New toy, available for immediate deportation.

Signed "MAD."
posted by Nomyte at 11:36 AM on January 30, 2013 [2 favorites]

+1 for the George Orwell reference in the title...
posted by jim in austin at 11:52 AM on January 30, 2013

This is delightful. Thanks!
posted by trip and a half at 12:23 PM on January 30, 2013

Shoot, Nomyte, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.
posted by Smedleyman at 12:40 PM on January 30, 2013 [1 favorite]

5. Neckerchief with lucky horseshoes tied in a fashionable manner.

Russians have dark sense of humor. News at 11.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 12:44 PM on January 30, 2013

Can anyone who does know Russian well tell me why this magazine is using "I" in place of the cyrillic "backward-N" it its title?
posted by eurypteris at 3:54 PM on January 30, 2013 [1 favorite]

Because it uses pre-revolutionary orthography, like I for modern И before vowels, silent ъ on nouns ending with consonants, ѣ in place of some cases where e now stands, antiquated endings like -ыя for -ые, and so on.
posted by Nomyte at 4:12 PM on January 30, 2013 [2 favorites]

Yeah, it's a nice site, with an oddly random selection of periodicals—as I said when I posted the link at LH last year, I sure hope they eventually put online the twenty-year run of Sovremennye zapiski, the most important emigré "thick journal," in which Nabokov published his great Russian works; that would be worth poring over for hours, whereas this is more of a "hey, cool!" thing.
posted by languagehat at 5:08 PM on January 30, 2013

> Prefaced of course by Lenin's exile in Switzerland during the Great War (elegantly described by Solzhenitsyn in Lenin in Zurich).

Actually, Lenin's pretty irrelevant in this context, since he didn't run any journals (just wrote nasty attacks on fellow socialists for them). The real precursor is Herzen's great exile journal The Bell.
posted by languagehat at 5:11 PM on January 30, 2013 [1 favorite]