In Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat” a ghost seeks to collect debt not for an individual transgression, but for the failings of an entire society. 

The Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia is a sparsely populated landmass that sits atop the Pacific Ring of Fire. Upon getting there, it became clear immediately that this would be an ideal place to disappear.

In “How to Disappear,” Akiko Busch contemplates how government surveillance, smart technology, and our own desire to be seen have all contributed to a perhaps irrevocable loss of personal privacy.

  Years before he worked alongside Thurgood Marshall on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the attorney Loren Miller spent the summer of 1932 in Moscow helping edit a Soviet anthology of “Negro poetry.” Miller had arrived that June wit…

There’s a phrase I’ve been thinking about a lot recently by the great Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He says in his book The Gulag Archipelago, “Wherever the law is, crime can be found.” —Ta-Nehisi Coates Chekhov for me is the great wr…

  In 1880, Oscar Wilde made the uneventful decision to write a play about Russian terrorism. I say it was uneventful because the play (his first), Vera; or the Nihilists, appeared amid a deluge of other crime thrillers, adventure tales, and even r…