ALEXANDER  KAN AN  INVISIBLE  ISLAND The Korean Diaspora of the CIS of 21-th century: An essay on the artistic mastering of a marginal consciousness (Translated by Steven Lee, Stanford University, USA) A great rejection               As one still remembers: a plastic being of the Soviet man was always in the fact that he clasped in his own hands something very narrow, limited in dimension...

Alexander KAN. Lasting Call: My Return to North Korea     Dedicated to my daughter Katya (Translated by Yoon Kan, Berkeley University of California)   View from the burial hill in the city of Hamhung   Ladies and gentlemen, let me begin with a passage from my first short story, “The Rules of the Game.” Written in 1987, this story defined the meaning and direction of my subsequent work. “An...

Confession of a 42-Year-Old Writer: From a Literature of Frustration to the Literature of Overcoming    Alexandr Kan As with people, objects oftentimes become sources that arouse particular memory of one’s past. Strangely, though, objects seem to hold still the past, present, and future of a person, unlike memory of people which is subject to constant change. I tend to treat all my personal b...

*This article was featured in Smple Magazine 05/2021https://www.smple.world/magazine/2021/5/9/5-rules-for-tutoring-a-russian-millionaireRule 1: Fake it till you make it Dimitri ushered me into a large office with walnut walls. I glanced up – it had a walnut ceiling too. Dazed, I focused on the man standing at the head of a long conference table. Anton was thickly built and dressed in black, his...

Source: Blockworks YouTube thumbnail  In the courtyard, there is a giant statue of a fist grasping a pen. It is defiant, empowering and apt. The library’s grounds are decorated with hundreds of perfectly lined trees, gardens weaved into the architecture, and stairways of bright, white stone. The building itself is breath-taking in scale, modelled after a neoclassical design and capped with a v...

In the distance, a baby wails. Above him drape the angel wings of a pillow fort’s white blankets. As we step closer, stained glass emerges, and a cradle, a candle on cloth. “Waaaaa!” goes the baby. A man hovers over it. “God,” the man says, “why did this have to happen to me?” It’s a gross baby. A fairy buzzes in. “Yes, yes,” the fairy agrees, “your first ones were prettier.” The fairy has a f...

In the distance, a baby wails. Above him drape the angel wings of a pillow fort’s white blankets. As we step closer, stained glass emerges, and a cradle, a candle on cloth. “Waaaaa!” goes the baby. A man hovers over it. “God,” the man says, “why did this have to happen to me?” It’s a gross baby. A fairy buzzes in. “Yes, yes,” the fairy agrees, “your first ones were prettier.” The fairy has a f...

Source: Blockworks YouTube thumbnail  In the courtyard, there is a giant statue of a fist grasping a pen. It is defiant, empowering and apt. The library’s grounds are decorated with hundreds of perfectly lined trees, gardens weaved into the architecture, and stairways of bright, white stone. The building itself is breath-taking in scale, modelled after a neoclassical design and capped with a v...