The Paris Review

Svetlana Alexievich with a cameraman in Kabul, 1988. Courtesy of Svetlana Alexievich.

Each week, The Paris Review unlocks stories, poems, and interviews from our archive for our readers. This week, to read alongside our inaugural

Richard Wagner Theater, Bayreuth, 1908, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Nothing at Bayreuth, the hundred-and-fifty-year-old opera festival created by and dedicated to the works of Richar...

Photograph by Aaron F. Stone, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

In the late seventies, my grandf...

There’s a Russian phrase that translates as something like “kitchen talk” and refers to the kind of conversation that, in the postwar Soviet Union, could happen only around the kitchen table. Previously, apartments had been almost always communal, with stovetops shared by multiple households. Suddenly, in poky single-family khrushchevka, a new social culture ...

Dorothea Lasky, via Wikimedia Commons; licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 (left). Mother, Wave Books (right).

Ac...