Eugene Hütz, founder and frontman with U.S. gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello, would likely to have ended up a painter wearing “dirty pants and long hair” had his parents not left the Soviet Union when he was 16. “I would probably have become a painter, as there was more of a path paved in that […]
In Daniel Rancour-Laferriere’s ambitious psychohistorical study, The Slave Soul of Russia: Moral Masochism and the Cult of Suffering, the author, a psychoanalytically-oriented Russian studies scholar, presents an overarching thesis: that Russian character was long grounded in masochistic tendencies. Scholars have long recognized that folktales as well as popular literature often express recurring psychological themes specific to […]