[dyavoliada]

ENVY 23&white west asian ☪︎. margarita nikolayevna replica; myopic but sensitive; difficult and gloomy. you who read me, are you sure you understand my language?

opinionated & an enemy of bourgeois thinking in every category. anti-psychiatry & abolitionist. i am part of the power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good; i am the tragic plaything of fate. i care abt the work of mikhail bulgakov and vladimir mayakovsky. i am fond of the labyrinth, the robot, the machine, the monster, the house, the garden of forking paths, and (anything resembling a) greek tragedy

Visit Original Link

[dyavoliada]

What astonished as-Saffar were the images. As soon as he set foot in France, he was overwhelmed by a flood of paintings and statues. The crucifix was a stumbling block from the moment he saw it for the first time in Aix:

"We saw a huge cross made of wood standing on one side of the town square. At its top was a smaller bit of wood made into the likeness of a crucified man, naked except for a cloth covering his maleness. What a sight it was! We were horrified to see it and thought he was a criminal they had hung there, for without a doubt, whoever saw it [would think it] was a crucified man. I asked about this and they told me it was the deity and the crucifix which they worshipped. They claim he is Jesus, that is to say, a likeness of him crucified. And there is no doubt that they believe in his divinity just as the Koran tells us, and there is no doubt about the untruth of their claim and the falsity of their belief" (1992, 108).

There are actually two shocks in this scene: on one hand, as-Saffar and his companions reject the belief in Christ's crucifixion; on the other hand, a wooden image seemed to them like a person of flesh and blood. ("We ... thought that he was a criminal they had hung there"). Their horror may be justified, in any case, for it was the first time they had seen a crucifix or even a statue; as we know, sculpture requires a training of the gaze that the members of the delegation had not had. Yet this is not all, for this illusion recalls that which deceived Christ's enemies when they crucified someone else in his place. The confusion of as-Saffar and his companions is similar to that of those who thought they had crucified Christ: in the first case, a wooden statue appeared to be a human being, and in the second, a man seemed to be Christ. It is as though the error that took place centuries before in Jerusalem is repeated in a town square in Aix.

— Abdelfattah Kilito, Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language

[dyavoliada]

hmm.

[dyavoliada]

I recalled Averröes, who, bounded within the circle of Islam, could never know the meaning of the words tragedy and comedy. I told his story: as I went on, I felt what that god mentioned by Burton must have felt—the god who set himself the task of creating a bull that turned out a buffalo. I felt that the work mocked me, foiled me, thwarted me. I felt that Averröes, trying to imagine what a play is without ever having suspected what theater is, was no more absurd than I, trying to imagine Averröes yet with no more material than a few snatches from Renan, Lane, and Asín Palacio. (Borges 1998, 241)

— Abdelfattah Kilito, Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language

[haunthouse]

the many covers of hill house

Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eight

at long last my attempt at collecting every single cover of hill house is live! 125+ covers, sortable by publishing date, language, and whether it's a movie/tv tie-in cover. if you know any more that aren't on here, leave a comment on the site so i can add them!

[rollercoasterwords]

publishers want fanfiction. it’s their own fault they can’t have it.

Tantalus, Giulio Sanuto, ca. 1557–70

okay guys my two cents #mytwocents

[theburialofstrawberries]

"In truth, I don’t think the creation of fanfiction poses any serious threat to capitalism; I think it operates solidly and safely within the bounds of capitalist acceptability as litigated by IP law. I think fanfiction can contain anticapitalist messages, and its creation may be motivated by anticapitalist ethics, but those are more a matter of individual writers’ sensibilities than a structural attribute of “fanfiction” as a literary genre. Rather than anticapitalist, I’ve begun to view fanfiction as the uniquely modern capitalist outlet for what, historically, has overwhelmingly been considered simply a natural product of human creativity: the creation of derivative stories."

[dyavoliada]

i have a 17 hr trip today. oh god

[dyavoliada]

Tsvetaeva noted this quality of his verse in her 1932 essay "Epic and Lyric in Contemporary Russia" ("Epos i lirika sovremennoi Rossii"):

Mayakovsky is the I-in-everything. . . . Mayakovsky is the conversion of self into object, the dissolution of self in object. . . . Mayakovsky is faceless; he became the thing he was depicting. Mayakovsky as a noun is collective. . . . Mayakovsky represents the impossibility of not merging with one's surroundings.

— Vladimir Mayakovsky: Selected Poems, translation and introduction by James H. McGavran III

[dyavoliada]

whatever i think about anything some guy in soviet russia already thought it

[dyavoliada]

hiiiii my question of reccs for the day is what are some of the soviet authors/works you'd reccommend 🤸🏻‍♀️✨

it is always a pleasure to have you here

mikhail bulgakov. i am of course biased here… i honestly think his life and times is a worthwhile well to explore (again, biased here), not in the least because his work is so inextricable from his own circumstances. he was an extremely autobiographical writer. i enjoy manuscripts don’t burn, a collection of letters to/from bulgakov, diary entries of yelena sergeyevna bulgakova, and other correspondent / personal writings that in some way had to do w bulgakov and his acquaintances, and a reader’s companion to mikhail bulgakov’s the master and margarita

^ other bulgakov writings: a dead man’s memoir: a theatrical novel (at times translated as black snow i believe) is a great fave. also notes on the cuff: & other stories

vladimir mayakovsky… volodya: selected works is a great intro, & im currently working through the northwestern world classics mayakovsky: selected poems. ive taken some looks into his love letters to lilya as well and im already enamored

^ mayakovsky faves include “i,” “a cloud in trousers,” and “the backbone flute” if you would like individual poems

anna akhmatova is worthwhile imo. i enjoy her poetics. she was acquainted with bulgakov & yelena as well, funnily enough.

daniil kharms is such a guy… i dont know if i should recommend him… absurdist whose work wasnt really circulated / known until - i wanna say post-soviet collapse. at the very least near that time. very very short, sometimes pithy, sometimes (darkly) amusing stories. has been described as “literary hooliganism.” he has a mini-mini-play that features gogol and pushkin repeatedly tripping over one another and apologizing and nothing else

[natalieplease]

Early drafts demonstrate that marriage was crucial to Shirley's vision of the novel from the start. In one version, the sister of Erica, the protagonist (later to be named Eleanor), wants to set her up with a man. "Carrie wanted me to get married, for some inscrutable reason," Erica says. "Perhaps she found the married state so excruciatingly disagreeable herself that it was the only thing bad enough she could think of to do to me." To be married, Shirley always feared, was to lose her sense of self, to disintegrate—precisely what happens to Eleanor in the grip of the house.

'Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life', by Ruth Franklin – Chapter 15. The Heart of the House (The Haunting of Hill House, 1958-1959)

[sunflowergf]

they dont make romances like this anymore

[dyavoliada]

DO WE KNOW ABT THIS

[srdcovka]

[ID: A translator is a mutarjim or a turjuman. As Lisan al-'arab and Lane's Dictionary indicate, tarjamah shares the root verb rajama, which means "to stone to death," with a sizeable constellation of words that include rajm (killing, beating, battering, reviling), rajam (well, cavity, hole in the ground, oven), rujm (shooting stars), rajeem (cast with stones, damned, an epithet of Satan, and also driven away, reviled, insulted), rujmah (grave and tombstones). The verb rajama also appears in expressions like rajm bil-ghayb (conjecture, soothsay- ing) and kalam marjum (uncertain or unreliable speech). End ID]

[dyavoliada]

DO WE KNOW ABT THIS

[dyavoliada]

august 04 2026

abdelfattah kilito, thou shalt not speak my language, "the translator," "illusion," (started) "between movement and stillness"

[dyavoliada]

the way that one is expected to engage w the topic of incest is that you should never be interested in dissecting its portrayals and any analysis you do of incestuous representations must be begrudging and self-hating and ever-affirmative of your disgust in having to perform such an act and i just think that you are at best a bit boring and thoughtless and at worst an active emotional threat to the people around you. lol

[dyavoliada]

im enjoying the interrogation kilito offers of comparative literature from a (post)colonial lens and particularly as it pertains and contributes to the process of rendering ‘middle eastern’ literature more desirable by allotting (euroamerican) audiences a (euroamerican) reference point. the assumption is that intrinsically arabic literature is uninspired, boring, lacking in mastery and flair; by contrast euroamerican literary products are universal (thats why they endure, youll be told), and it is only by invoking such universality that arabic literature can be a subject of interest

[dyavoliada]

esp captivating are the tensions of oral vs written literary traditions, of poetics vs philosophy, as discursive strategies for addressing this core issue