The whole civilised world joins Germany this year in celebration of the twenty fifth anniversary of the Fall of the Wall.
It could have been also a celebration of the Fall of the Iron Curtain between the former Soviet Union and the rest of Europe.
But another wall has been recently built instead of the Iron Curtain in the modern Russia – this time an invisible one, but no less impenetrable than the Iron Curtain: the mental wall of alienation from the rest of the world.
We live surrounded by walls that are protect us as well as exclude and divide us – physically as well as ideologically. But a wall, a partition, a screen could also be the means of communication between those who are separated from each other.
Listen to a recording of this evening here
Zinovy Zinik, born in Moscow who settled down in Britain forty years ago after a couple of years spent in Jerusalem, will be talking about his experience of facing different kinds of walls – in life and literature.
Zinovy Zinik’s recent books of prose include History Thieves (Seagull Books, London, 2010) and Third Jerusalem (NLO, Moscow, 2013). He is a regular contributor to The Times Literary Supplement. Zinik is also London Editor of Artenol – a new satirical magazine on arts and culture, founded in New York by Alexander Melamid. Zinovy Zinik’s working now on a cycle of short stories (in Russian and in English) that involve characters whose lives had drastically changed after they got accidentally incarcerated in the most obvious and ridiculous places.