GEOFF BOTTOMS appreciates the local touch brought to a production of Dickens’s perennial classic
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A poignant remembrance of things past
FM Dostoevsky Academic Drama Theatre in Nizhny Novgorod, designed by V Somov, built in 1987
[Arseniy Kotov]
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a production whose design and cartoonish acting overwhelms the close scrutiny of characters
SUSAN DARLINGTON enjoys the raucous familiarity of a traditional topsy-turvy pantomime
RON JACOBS introduces the latest novel by the best writer of US working-class fiction writing today
HENRY BELL is fascinated by the underlying curiosities and contradictions of one of the great poets of the Mediterranean
DAVID RENTON recommends a books that explores the ways in which disabled people are made to feel both of and not part of this world
SOVIET CITIES Labour Life Leisure
by Arseniy Kotov
FUEL £24.95
“I WAS born in 1988 and have no experience of life in the USSR, but looking at its architecture it is clear that it was a great civilisation with a genuine intention to build a fairer society,” writes Arseniy Kotov in the introduction to his fascinating photographic record of the Soviet Union interrupted.
Kotov denotes the ever-present art on the facades of buildings, particularly housing estates, with motives from socialist life and regrets the demise of the architecturally legendary palaces of culture — vibrant communal hubs with workshops, lectures, performances — these days transformed into indoor markets where now, its once gainfully employed visitors and participants, eke a meagre living.
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HENRY BELL notes the curious confluence of belief, rebuilding and cheap materials that gave rise to an extraordinary number of modernist churches in post-war Scotland
RON JACOBS recommends a painstaking study of the communists and revolutionaries who congregated in Moscow after 1917
NICK WRIGHT delicately unpicks the eloquent writings on art of an intellectual pessimist who wears his Marxism lightly
In advance of their performances in London BEN LUNN speaks to PETER PAUL KAINRATH, artistic director of Klangforum Wien