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Russia

Reading Mother Night in Russia(n) | Phillips on Mother Night

By Dan Pyle in Anthropology on

Sarah Phillips   Kurt Vonnegut was the most popular American writer in the Soviet Union in the 1970s,1 and it will not surprise Vonnegut fans to learn that he predicted his own success. In Mother Night (1961), the protagonist Howard W. Campbell, Jr. provides a fictional account of one Stepan Bodovskov’s (plagiaristic) literary success in Russia, in particular the success …

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The Banality of Irony | Harriss on Mother Night

By Dan Pyle in Religious Studies on

Cooper Harriss   Mother Night finds Vonnegut back on terra firma, inhabiting the near past and present tense for the first time as he works out the vagaries of postwar life, coming to terms with virtue’s erosion and the illusion of innocence. Still, something is amiss. “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be very careful about …

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