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Sorry Not Sorry

A casual reader of the news from South Korea could be forgiven for wondering whether Koreans apologize more than other people do. Public expressions of contrition abound. Last year, President Park Geun-hye apologized for the government’s mishandling of the Sewol ferry disaster, and JoongAng Ilbo , one of the country’s major newspapers, ran a full-page apology for its sensationalist coverage of the tragedy. When, earlier this year, the MERS virus spread through Seoul’s Samsung Medical Center, the minister of health apologized “for causing concern and anxiety” by underestimating the disease’s contagiousness, and the heir apparent to the Samsung Group did the same, bowing deeply from the waist on national television. Then, there was last year’s “nut rage” incident, in which a Korean Air Lines executive went berserk after a flight attendant served her macadamia nuts in a bag rather than in a bowl. She demanded that he beg her forgiveness, only to apologize herself, later, as did her father, the company’s chairman, and her sister, who had threatened to seek vengeance on whistle-blowing employees. And Korean-Americans might recall that the country’s Ambassador to the United States called on them to “repent” after it was discovered that the gunman who carried out the Virginia Tech massacre was born in Korea, proposing a thirty-two-day fast, one day per victim, to prove that Koreans were a “worthwhile ethnic minority in America.”

Hierarchy—social, corporate, political—is the major organizing principle of Korean life, and apology is one of its crucial mechanisms. When those lower down the chain screw up, decorum demands that they apologize to those higher up; when those higher up wrong those lower down, apology functions as an affirmation of accountability, an expression of responsibility of the few toward the many. South Korea perennially demands apology from Japan, its former colonizer, which in 1993 acknowledged forcing women (many of them Korean) into sexual slavery during the Second World War. There are practical reasons for wanting such repeated reassurance; the rise of aggressive nationalism in a neighbor that has invaded you countless times across the centuries is certainly a distressing trend. But South Korea’s insistence on fresh acknowledgment of misdeeds long past, and its distress when such acknowledgment fails to come, also stem from the quintessentially Korean concept of han , a mélange of sadness, rage, and despair—a condition born of a sense of oppression and grievance, and impossible to assuage by apologies alone.

The Korean apology is satirized to harrowing effect in “At Least We Can Apologize,” a darkly comic 2009 novel by the South Korean writer Lee Ki-ho, published in this country by Dalkey Archive Press as part of its Library of Korean Literature series. The narrator, Jin-man, is equipped with a literal mind and a disconcerting lack of curiosity, and lives at “the institution,” a disreputable mental ward that doubles as a sock-packaging plant. Fluorescent lights burn around the clock, and the staff subdues residents with daily cocktails of pills. “When I first entered the institution I was beaten almost daily,” Jin-man recounts, in Christopher J. Dykas’s translation. “I was beaten in the morning, beaten at lunchtime, and beaten before bed.” As he goes through the menu of brutality, a certain giddiness sets in:

I was beaten with a pointer, beaten with a steel pipe, slapped, punched, kicked with a booted foot, and even beaten with a thick book. I was beaten with a chair, beaten with a trashcan, beaten with socks, and beaten with a shovel. After being beaten like this for some time, one day I looked over and there was Si-bong. He had both arms wrapped around his head as he was being beaten. That was the first time that Si-bong and I met. After that, we were beaten together every day. We were beaten together under our beds, beaten together in the hallway, beaten together after being called into the office, beaten together in the workroom, beaten together on the hill behind the institution, and beaten together in front of the main gate. Being beaten together like that for so long, we became friends.

Falsely confessing to random wrongdoing—swearing at their superiors, throwing out medication—results in milder punishment, so Jin-man and Si-bong learn to game the system:

Si-bong admitted to cursing the caretakers again and was beaten repeatedly in the thighs with a steel pipe. The caretakers said that committing the same wrong again was an even greater wrong. So we had to come up with new wrongs every day. Some of them became “wrongs,” while others became “greater wrongs.” On days we committed wrongs, we were beaten less, on days we committed “greater wrongs,” we were beaten a lot, and on days we admitted to nothing, we were beaten repeatedly all day long.

Jin-man and Si-bong are honest liars. They always make sure to commit their offenses after admitting to them, proving so adept at the racket that their caretakers put them in charge of collecting the apologies of the other inmates. This equilibrium is interrupted by the arrival of a new guy, “the man with the sideburns,” who despairs at his confinement and tosses messages over the institution’s fence in an attempt to reach the outside world. Jin-man and Si-bong start to copy him, packing their notes—“ We are being held captive. If you find this note, please report this to the police. The man in our room said that you will be generously rewarded ”—into sock crates. The messages hit their mark. The institution collapses in scandal, and Jin-man and Si-bong emerge to a media frenzy. Camping out at the dingy apartment of Si-bong’s sister and her pimp boyfriend, they fruitlessly hunt for jobs until they hit on the idea of marketing their sole indisputable skill: apologizing for someone else’s sins.

One of their first customers is a ten-year-old boy who has stolen money from his mother’s purse. Jin-man and Si-bong accompany him to his mother’s small food shop, where the irate woman threatens to “break this little bastard’s wrist.” Primed by their impeccable training at the institution, the newly minted businessmen spring into action, offering their own bodies up for abuse. As mother and son look on in horror, Si-bong takes a pipe and whacks Jin-man repeatedly on the wrist.

“An apology means that you say you’re not going to do the same thing that you did before,” Si-bong explains to another customer. “That’s all it is. There’s nothing we can do about your feelings, sir.” By outsourcing a gesture whose only value comes from the intent behind it, Jin-man and Si-bong turn the apology, that most civilized of interactions, into a mercenary performance, a backstreet Grand Guignol. It’s a lucrative one, too. “There are wrongs upon wrongs out there,” the pimp says, with growing excitement at the new business’s possibilities. “That means the apologies will just keep coming.”

“At Least We Can Apologize” is divided into three sections, whose titles—“Finding Wrong,” “Creating Wrong,” and “Cultivating Wrong”—describe a surefire, if unmistakably cynical, business strategy. What started, at the institution, as a simple means of survival becomes, in the outside world, an industry with the promise of limitless growth.

For American readers, literary evocations of Korea have come, for the most part, in the form of dystopian novels written by people without any direct connection to the country. Adam Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Orphan Master’s Son,” is set in the harsh confines of North Korea; at the other extreme, David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas” features a futuristic South Korea-inspired “corpocracy,” a hotbed of clones, plastic surgery (“facescaping”), and insurrection. With few exceptions, novels by actual Koreans have not registered here. Kyung-sook Shin’s “Please Look After Mom” briefly appeared on the Times best-seller list in 2011. (She made headlines this year amid charges that she once plagiarized passages from a Yukio Mishima story, for which—yes—she later apologized.) Kim Young-ha’s “I Have the Right to Destroy Myself” (2007) and Hwang Sok-yong’s “The Old Garden” (2009) both received a trickle of reviews, and Yi Mun-yol’s story “An Anonymous Island” appeared in these pages in 2011. That’s about it. Happily, Dalkey Archive’s series, launched in 2013, in collaboration with the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, provides a panoramic view of Korean fiction, in all its strangeness and variety, from the nineteen-thirties to the present.

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That’s a significant span in the life of any country, but all the more so in the case of Korea. Two decades ago, when I spent a year in Seoul, the city my parents came from, after I graduated from college, I couldn’t have fathomed that South Korea would become an epicenter of state-of-the-art anything; there was hardly any evidence that a new, high-tech, high-speed civilization was on the way. Things changed after the Asian financial crisis of 1997. As Euny Hong detailed last year, in her book “The Birth of Korean Cool,” the South Korean government, reeling from the recession, decided to invest in pop culture as a prime export, resulting in the wildly popular boy bands and girl bands and soap operas that went on to make up  hallyu , the wave of Korean culture that has swept over Asia, and, increasingly, the rest of the world. These days, South Korea is famous for being among the most wired countries in the world, with whip-fast Internet speeds and a smartphone in every hand. Thousands fill stadiums to watch video-game tournaments, and plastic surgery seems as common as hair dye. It sounds like science fiction.

Such breakneck change can’t help but come at a price. The titular mother in “Please Look After Mom,” for instance, travels from the countryside to Seoul to visit her grown children, only to get lost in the subway. The novel captures the unsettling dislocation of the country’s rapid rural-to-urban transformation, and the transition from an elder-venerating Confucian hierarchy to a youth-focussed culture obsessed with physical beauty. This degree of change has left a deadly legacy: as Kim Young-ha noted in a Times Op-Ed last year, South Korea’s suicide rate has been the highest in the industrialized world for eight years running.

The novels in the Library of Korean Literature series are populated with the broken and the dispossessed, young drifters, like Jin-man and Si-bong, looking to carve out a place for themselves in an ungraspable, shifting world. Another such character introduces himself in the first sentence of Jang Jung-il’s novel “When Adam Opens His Eyes,” translated by Hwang Sun-Ae and Horace Jeffery Hodges: “I was nineteen years old, and the things that I most wanted to have were a typewriter, prints of Munch’s paintings and a turntable for playing records.” The nameless narrator (he’s called Adam by a lover, in honor of his being her first man) hasn’t scored high enough on the standardized exam to get into the university of his choice, so he plans to spend a year cramming.

Naturally, he doesn’t lift a finger to accomplish that goal—which isn’t to say that he does nothing. A hundred pages later, he buys a typewriter, and with it the promise of a different, differently programmed life. “If I write a novel, I will begin by depicting the portrait of my 19th year this way,” he says, and then quotes the book’s first paragraph nearly verbatim. This seems an optimistic conclusion—the narrator has made something of himself, and we’ve just finished reading the evidence—but, on the next page, Jang violently drops us into the novel’s wildly discordant final section, “The Seventh Day.” If the book’s first stretch was a study in passivity, “The Seventh Day” is all action: sex, lots of it, between an unnamed man and woman, graphically described and mixed with literary chat. “No virgin finds climaxing easy in her first experience,” Jang deadpans. “Except that this is a porno novel.” (The transgressive 1999 film “Lies,” which might be retitled “Fifty Thousand Shades of Grey,” was based on another of Jang’s novels.) Like the coda to Don DeLillo’s “The Names” or Wong Kar-wai’s “Days of Being Wild,” the end of “When Adam Opens His Eyes” seems spliced in from a different work. Who are these nameless, insatiable characters? Maybe they are yet another product—concentrated, unbearably intense—of the narrator’s typewriter, the vision that comes with Adam’s newly gained knowledge of the world.

“When Adam Opens His Eyes” was published in 1990, before South Korea’s great pop boom; the narrator’s typewriter and cassette player are practical necessities, not ironic totems of a bygone age. But a number of more recent novels betray a certain nostalgia for an earlier, less technological time, when life didn’t have to be constantly mediated by a screen. No computers show up in “At Least We Can Apologize,” and when Jin-man and Si-bong make calls they do it strictly via pay phone. A similar analog atmosphere can be found in “No One Writes Back,” by Jang Eun-jin, also published in 2009, and translated by Jung Yewon. “I left home with an MP3 player and a novel in an old backpack,” the novel begins. The speaker is Jihun, who for three years has moved from motel to motel with his late grandfather’s faithful, though blind, guide dog. He spends his time looking for places to stay, carrying on a one-sided correspondence with the people he meets on his rambles, and skirting his own vast, withheld sorrow. “I write letters because I want to convey to someone the stories of these people,” he explains, “but also because I want to let someone know that a day had existed for me as well.” One gets the sense that the immediacy of text messaging and e-mail would be too much for Jihun to handle; he wants to make contact with other people, but not at the expense of keeping his distance.

“No One Writes Back” is composed of short, numbered chapters, its progression echoing Jihun’s own peripatetic existence. As if to avoid the complications that could come from any budding intimacy, Jihun assigns numbers rather than names to the people he writes to. “My name is . . . ,” one of the people he encounters, a writer selling her novel on the subway, starts to tell him. He cuts her short: “ ‘I don’t want to know,’ I say, because I fear that we really will have to get to know each other once we start calling each other by name.”

The book’s centerpiece is Jihun’s letter to his sister, who has become a cosmetic-surgery addict. “With scissors in hand, you cut up all the photos with your face in them, and even burned up the photos of your hundredth day celebration and your first birthday party,” he writes. The letter is a heartbroken critique of a society gone insane with images. Seen through Jihun’s eyes, the Korean craze for such facescaping starts to seem a sort of unconscious sacrifice: in order to be properly absorbed, the dramatic changes visited on the nation need to be visited on the body as well.

The most appealing novels in the Library of Korean Literature capture the existential turbulence of han while keeping a sense of humor about it. The didactic moments in Yi Kwang-su’s “The Soil,” a social-realist tome originally serialized in 1932 and 1933, are balanced with wry observations of customs and people, such as the modern man who has internalized Japanese values and looks down his nose at his country’s educational system: “Yes, there’s the Department of Korean Literature. I really don’t know what students learn there. I think literature is useless anyway. And to study Korean literature? Even worse.” (Yi, the most famous writer in the series, was one of the country’s first modernists and a leader of the Korean independence movement, though he was later tarred as a Japanese collaborator.)

More recently, Park Min-gyu’s “Pavane for a Dead Princess,” set in the late nineteen-eighties and translated by Amber Hyun Jung Kim, tracks the doomed romance of its handsome narrator, a valet at a fancy shopping mall, and his co-worker, a shy, intelligent woman who is mocked for being homely—“the world’s ugliest woman.” Though she had the best grades at her vocational school, she’s never promoted; Park is blunt about the unfairness of a society wrapped up in surfaces, in which the unlovely are confined to a kind of permanent underclass, at least until they go under the knife. “Pavane” is a bildungsroman that veers into metafiction, bristling with footnotes and multiple endings. There’s also plenty of comic relief, such as this sterling career advice for a new valet, turning the impulse to apologize on its head:

“Now let’s suppose there’s been an accident. This is what you have to do, so listen and learn. First, take off your armband and cap. Next, run back to the office without looking back. If the supervisor’s there, knock him out. Open the second drawer of his desk and look for your employee record. Either tear that into shreds and swallow it or burn it. Then run straight home. Then start looking for another job. Is that clear?”

When you do something wrong, flee the scene: this would be bad business for Jin-man and Si-bong, inverting the bleak social order that they aim to exploit. Later in “At Least We Can Apologize,” Jin-man and Si-bong are recaptured by the sinister caretakers of the institution; the only way for Jin-man to escape is to sacrifice his friend. “I had committed a wrong against him, but I missed him very much,” Jin-man thinks. “That was all.” Apologies are only a partial salve for wrongdoing; they acknowledge, but do not reverse, the harm that’s been done. Jin-man, it turns out, has a conscience. This discovery recalls a line from the start of the novel, the attempt by the man with the sideburns to open Jin-man and Si-bong’s eyes: “ ‘Look at you! You guys are fine and you’re locked up in here!’ ” Maybe Jin-man and Si-bong were never crazy to begin with—no crazier, in any case, than the country awaiting them outside the gates. ♦

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📖Invitation à la littérature coréenne📖  ✨Jeu concours: mini critique✨ ✔Public cible : étudiants en études coréennes en France ✔Période de participation : du jeudi 9 au dimanche 19 mai 2024 ✔Nombre de gagnants : 5 ✔Annonce du résultat : par contact individuel le mardi 21 mai 2024 ✔Cadeau : un exemplaire original (en coréen) d’un des auteurs invités (choix aléatoire parmi 5 livres) Veuillez noter que nous demanderons leurs informations personnelles aux gagnants pour la remise du bon d’achat. ✔Pour participer : 1️⃣Lisez les œuvres des 4 auteurs participants à cette «Invitation à la littérature coréenne».📖 2️⃣Publiez une mini critique sur les réseaux sociaux en utilisant les hashtags suivants: #Invitation_à_la_Littérature_Coréenne #Littératurecoréenne #LTIK 3️⃣Laissez le lien URL de votre publication dans les commentaires! 📢Auteurs et autrices invité(e)s: -Lee Seung-U, Pyun Hye-young: romanciers -Jin Eun-young: poète -Yeong-shin Ma: auteur de roman graphique Si vous ne pouvez participer à cet événement, ne soyez pas trop déçu!  💡 Détails et informations sur l’événement: https://klwave.or.kr/klw/klContents/56/eventView.do Suivez ltikorea_official pour vous tenir au courant des prochains événements à venir💞

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Drumroll, please! 🥁 We're excited to announce the winners of the April edition of our Subscriber's Event for our revamped monthly newsletter, now known as the LTI Korea Letter! 📭✨  📢 Stay informed about the latest Korean literature translation news by subscribing to our monthly newsletter! 🗞🙌 Participate in our Subscriber Events and you could even snag a FREE month of Audible audio-books! 🎧  💌 Subscribe now! ➡️ https://bit.ly/LTInews_En (Or check the link to our newsletter in our bio!) 👀 Check out our latest newsletter 👉 https://bit.ly/newsarch_EN ----------------------------------------------- 당첨을 축하합니다! 🎉 새롭게 단장한 번역원 레터의 4월 구독자 이벤트 당첨자를 발표합니다. 📢 번역원 뉴스레터에서는 한국 문학 및 번역에 관련된 최근 업데이트와 유용한 정보를 받으실 수 있습니다! 🗞🙌 구독자 이벤트에 참여하고 밀리의 서재 1개월 구독권도 받아보세요! 📱 💌 최신 번역원 소식을 놓치지 않으려면 지금 구독해 보세요! ➡️ https://bit.ly/LTInews_Kr   (또는 프로필에서 뉴스레터 링크 확인하세요!) 👀 최신 호 보러가기 👉 https://bit.ly/newsarch_KR . . . #newsletter #stayInformed #Koreanliterature #koreanlit #translation #LTIKorea #latestnews #subscribenow #stayupdated #뉴스레터 #한국문학번역원 #번역원 #구독신청 #새로운소식 #한국문학 #번역 #지금가입하세요 #구독

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KOREAN TALES: BEING A COLLECTION OF STORIES TRANSLATED FROM THE KOREAN FOLK LORE

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Open Access Literature Databases

• Digital Library of Korean Literature / 한국문학 디지털도서관  [English/Korean] : As the world’s only multilingual archive of Korean literature and related contents, the LTI Korea Library provides various types of resources from all over the world, including e-books and bibliographic information on translated Korean works, as well as introductory materials on Korean writers, and overseas press releases. To access full-texts of literature as well as other E-Resource (Videos, or Audios) ,  you will need to create an account and allow for popups .

LTI Korea: Literature Translation Institute of Korea  /  한국문학번역원   [English/Korean] : 

Media Resources Center ( Video clips of interviews with writers ) ;  E-books ( 20th century Korean Literature /  Digital Library of Korean Classics  /  Korean Literature in English ) ;  List of Translated Titles   available. 

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• [근대문학] 1960년대 현실주의 문학비평과 매체의 비평전략 by 하상일 저 ISBN: 8956263019 Publication Date: 2012
• [현대문학] 한국현대문학비평사 by 김영민 저 ISBN: 9788988375365 Publication Date: 2012
• [근대문학] 프로문학의 감성구조 by 손유경 저 ISBN: 9788956267401 Publication Date: 2015
• [근대문학] 한국 근ㆍ현대 여성문학 장의 형성 : 문학제도와 양식 by 김양선 저 ISBN: 9788956267838 Publication Date: 2015

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• 역사 는 흐른다 : 장편 소설. by Han, Mu-suk ISBN: 8932470405 Publication Date: 1992
• 토지 대하 소설 T'oji : taeha sosŏl / 土地 : 大河 小說 v. 1-13 by 박경리 작 / 朴 景利 作. Publication Date: 1976
• Onŭl ŭi Han'guk munhak 33-in sŏn. 오늘 의 韓國 文學 33人 選. v. 1-33 Publication Date: 1993
• 메아리 논술 한국 문학 v. 1-36 by 편집위원 金 東里 김동리 ISBN: 8914009173 Publication Date: 1996
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Awarding-winning Korean literary gems on show at COEX

A n array of award-winning Korean literary gems, from a novel recounting the horrors of Jeju Island’s 1948 massacres to a gripping dystopian feminist eco-thriller, have been curated for an exhibition at the Starfield Library in southern Seoul's COEX.

“Springing to Life,” co-organized by the library and the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, features 13 original Korean books alongside their 82 translated editions, all of which have garnered international recognition since 2019.

One of the highlights is the International Booker Prize-winning author Han Kang’s “I Do Not Bid Farewell,” which clinched the Prix Médicis for foreign literature last November, marking the first time a Korean work has been honored with the reputable French award.

The novel delves into the tragic events of the Jeju April 3 Uprising through the perspectives of three women. The incident saw approximately 30,000 civilians — nearly 10 percent of the island’s population at the time — purged in an anti-communist military campaign.

Also on view is “Phantom Pain Wings” by poetic heavyweight Kim Hye-soon. This poignant anthology of 72 poems nabbed the U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award in the poetry category in March.

To depict the haunting memory of war trauma and the endless struggles against injustice, Kim combines her signature experimental language with elements drawn from Korea’s folklore and legends, as well as cultural legacies plucked from different parts of the world.

Two graphic novels are included in the show: Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s “Grass” and Ma Yeong-shin’s “Moms.” Both pieces received the Harvey Award for Best International Book in 2020 and 2021, respectively.

“Grass” offers an unflinching portrayal of the victims of Japan’s wartime sex slavery, while “Moms” presents a darkly humorous, unfiltered portrait of four women in their mid-50s in Korea as they navigate complicated love lives, sexual adventures and menial jobs.

On May 10, author Han will provide insight into the background and creative process behind “I Do Not Bid Farewell” through a lecture and a reading.

“Springing to Life” runs through May 12.

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Step inside 'Leninka,' Russia's largest and oldest library (PHOTOS)

The Russian State Library, and the monument to Fyodor Dostoyevsky in front of it

The camera clicks cause all eyes in the hall to switch disapprovingly from the reading material in front of them to the photographer – the source of unwelcome noise. “Keep silence” here is as common a sign as “No smoking” on board a plane.

The moment we show up with our photographic gear, the library supervisors, like hawks, swoop on us from all sides, demanding to see our permission to take photos (thankfully, we have it on us). With custodians such as these, the largest book collection in Russia need never fear for its security .

Some history

Initially, the library collection was formed from the personal collection of manuscripts and rare books of Count Nikolai Rumyantsev, a Russian statesman. By personal order of Nicholas I, the Rumyantsev Museum was founded in St Petersburg in 1828. Over time, however, it could not withstand the competition from other institutions in Russia’s then capital, so the decision was taken to relocate the institution to Moscow. It was assigned one of the most beautiful buildings right outside the Kremlin walls, Pashkov House .

After the 1917 Revolution, the library flourished. The capital followed the library to Moscow, and the Rumyantsev Museum essentially became the country’s main depository of books; a new building and indeed a new book depository were subsequently built for it. Today, the library buildings occupy an entire block. And Pashkov House is also home to a music section, as well as a manuscripts and cartography department .

In Soviet times, the Rumyantsev Museum was renamed the Lenin State Library of the USSR, in whose honor the nearby subway station, opened in 1935, was christened Biblioteka imeni Lenina (Lenin Library). In more recent times, the library shed its Lenin prefix, but by then the name had stuck, and it is still referred to today as the Leninka.

In 2013, a special library department and reading room opened at Moscow’s Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center. It houses the Schneerson Library – a collection of religious and secular literature by Hasidic Jews. Since then, however, the materials in the collection have been completely digitized .

Some modernity

Visiting the library of, say, Oxford University in Britain, one feels the hand of ancient history resting on the shoulder. Likewise, the Leninka plunges the curious visitor into the past, nearer in time, yet still gone. Green halls, cloth-covered tables, lamps – it is embalmed socialism with a human face, and perhaps the best that remains of the lost Soviet empire .

The Leninka is never empty, its cloakroom always buzzing with people. Every second, young women in short skirts and bespectacled professors ascend the main staircase of exquisite beauty. An eccentric fire-red haired lady of indeterminate age, humming something to herself, strides confidently into the music section, clearly a frequenter .

Inside the library are several reading rooms kitted out with computers, as well as endless corridors and recesses with reading desks. The conveyor belt continuously churns out all kinds of volumes and folios from the book depository. Yours truly has time to catch sight of an Italian teach-yourself guide, a book on the basics of accounting, and a rare edition of Boris Pasternak .

For some pilgrims, the library is a near religious experience – a ritual replete with antique books and tables with the old-world scent of wooden cabinets, parquet floors, and history itself hanging in the air. Switched on, the legendary green lamps plunge the room into an atmosphere of wonder .

A smartly dressed elderly gentleman examines a manuscript through a magnifying glass, nearby sits a stern-looking middle-aged woman in glasses, clearly a teacher. Their neighbor is a bearded professor, and one table away a group of students are taking selfies. Other students, Chinese, are diligently studying Russian (making up for time lost on less academic activities).

In the hall with card files, the atmosphere is more relaxed. A pensioner reads freshly pressed magazines so as not to purchase them. At the next table, a man in a tracksuit is solving a crossword puzzle. Is he passing time before catching a train? Or just exercising the grey cells? On the topic of exercise, some even do the physical kind. One visitor, for instance, spreads out a rubber sheet in a remote corridor and does gymnastics, nourishing the mind and body in true Ancient Greek style .

Some numbers

Today, the library houses more than 47 million units of storage in 367 languages, including some rare Oriental ones. In addition to publications (the library receives an obligatory copy of all printed works), there are rare manuscripts, printed versions of visual arts, photo materials, maps, sheet music, periodicals, regulatory acts, military literature, and, of course, literature on the art of librarianship. Here, one can also find every dissertation written in the country since 1951 .

The library has 36 reading rooms open to visitors, and Wi-Fi is near ubiquitous. Around 100,000 new users register annually. Employees offer up an interesting statistic: Every minute the library doors are opened by five visitors.

The Leninka is currently in the process of digitizing its archives. Its electronic library already has 1.3 million documents, not to mention access to remote electronic databases, including those of Cambridge University Press and Springer Publishing, various online library databases, and the JSTOR archive of digitized journals. The full list is available on the Leninka website .

Citizens at least 14 years old of any country can register at the library. And it is absolutely free – all that’s required is a piece of ID (plus passport and visa for those without visa-free entry to Russia) .

The procedure takes no more than ten minutes. You will be photographed and issued a plastic library card. Students often joke that the mugshot on your Leninka card is bound to be the worst you’ve ever had (you can always blame the photographer). That said, these days it’s possible to sign up online .

After registration, you will need to offload your coat and any large bags or rucksacks to the cloakroom. One small bag and a laptop can be taken inside .

The library is open from 9 am to 8 pm every day except Sunday. Be prepared to have to wait for the book you want, perhaps even a few hours while it gets delivered from the book depository. If time is short, you can always order a book and pick it up the next day .

For many a long year, the Leninka had a reputation as a place for meeting one’s better half – a wife or husband from a respectable professorial family. Some visited the library with this specific purpose in mind. If the walls of the Leninka smoking room could talk, they would tell quite a story. For it was here that romantic hopefuls came to chat so as not to violate the hallowed silence of the reading rooms .

In the Oscar-winning movie Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears , the heroine, a provincial student, pines away in the Leninka reading hall, eyeing up any number of suitable matches, before heading into the smoking room, where two young academics simultaneously offer her a light. According to the library supervisors, visitors still ask about the famous smoking room, but alas, it is no longer there – smoking is now prohibited inside the building. But don’t despair, there’s a wonderful canteen instead. If that’s not a place for kindred souls to find each other, what is?

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Watch CBS News

Russian court says American man jailed for hooliganism after drunkenly breaking into children's library

Updated on: May 7, 2024 / 11:29 AM EDT / CBS/AFP

Moscow  — A Moscow court said Tuesday that it had sentenced a U.S. citizen to 10 days in detention for petty hooliganism after he stumbled drunkenly into a children's library and passed out. News of the American's detention came just hours after Russian and U.S. authorities said a  U.S. soldier was being held in custody in the far eastern city of Vladivostok on suspicion of theft in a separate case.

Russia's REN TV said the man detained in Moscow had climbed through the window of a children's library in the Russian capital and fallen asleep while drunk. Video aired by the network showed a person, partially clothed, laying in what appeared to be a courtyard of the building.

It said the man had been staying with friends in Moscow on a tourist visa and ended up at the library after being out with friends at a bar.

In a statement posted on its official channel on the Telegram messaging app, the Khoroshevsky District Court of Moscow said the man, identified as Nikum William Russell, was sentenced to 10 days under "administrative arrest" on a charge of petty hooliganism after he "drank alcoholic beverages, then was found in the courtyard, naked, expressing clear disrespect for society, citizens and public order."

There was no immediate confirmation of the arrest from U.S. authorities.

U.S. soldier arrested, accused of theft

News of the American's detention came just hours after Russian and U.S. authorities said a U.S. soldier was being held in custody in the far eastern city of Vladivostok on suspicion of theft. The U.S. Army said the soldier, identified by a court in Vladivostok and by U.S. officials to CBS News as Gordon Black, was being detained on criminal charges.

The U.S. Army sergeant, who was stationed in South Korea, was accused of stealing from a woman, two Pentagon officials told CBS News on Monday, confirming information provided by Russian authorities.

Black had been in the process of changing duty stations from Korea to Fort Cavazos (Ft. Hood) in the U.S., and he was not in Russia on official travel for the military, the U.S. officials told CBS News.

Black enlisted in the U.S. Army as an infantryman in 2008, Army spokeswoman Cynthia Smith said. He deployed to Iraq from Oct. 2009 through Sept. 2010, and then to Afghanistan from June 2013 until March 2014.

He was an instructor at the Non-Commissioned Officer Academy in South Korea, according to one official and Black's mother. Black's records say that he's married; his mother says he has a 7-year-old daughter in Texas and is in the process of obtaining a divorce.

The soldier's mother, Melody Jones, said he was in Russia visiting his girlfriend.

"Please do not torture him [or] hurt him," she said when asked about her message to the Russians.

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters Monday that the U.S. was "aware of this case and other matters related to Russia," but said he couldn't "say much about it right now."  NBC News first reported that a soldier had been detained in Russia over the weekend.

Vladivostok city police said they had arrested a 34-year-old foreigner and opened a criminal case over theft causing significant harm to the victim, punishable by up to five years in prison. The police said he was being held in a pre-trial detention center in the city.

The force said the man had begun a relationship with a Russian woman while she was working in South Korea. They kept in touch online and he flew to visit her on April 10. The couple had a "conflict" and the man left, according to the police.

Afterward, the woman found money was missing and called police, who tracked down the man in a hotel as he was preparing to fly out to the U.S., the police said. Russian newspaper Izvestia reported earlier, citing a source, that the man had stolen 200,000 rubles ($2,200) and beaten the woman up.

Russia denies any link to "politics or espionage"

A Russian foreign ministry representative in Vladivostok told TASS state news agency that the case was not linked to politics.

"This case is not related to politics or espionage. As far as we understand this is a purely domestic crime. Therefore the foreign ministry branch in Vladivostok is not following the U.S. citizen's fate closely."

Republican Congressman Michael McCaul, representing Texas, said in a statement posted on X that he was "deeply concerned by reports that a US Army officer has been detained in Russia".

"Putin has a long history of holding American citizens hostage," he said of Russian President Vladimir Putin, adding: "A warning to all Americans — as the State Department has said, it is not safe to travel to Russia."

Russian authorities have arrested several U.S. citizens in recent years. Critics accuse Moscow of using the detainees as bargaining chips to exchange for Russians jailed in the U.S.

Paul Whelan , a former U.S. Marine, has been imprisoned in Russia since 2018 on spying charges that the U.S. government and his family insist are a baseless pretext to keep him incarcerated. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison in 2020.

Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was jailed in March 2023 on espionage charges, which the U.S., his family and employer all insist are baseless. He is awaiting trial.

The State Department said in December that Russia rejected a "significant" proposal for both men's release. 

Eleanor Watson and David Martin contributed to this report.

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Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)

What's on pyongyang's weapons shopping list in moscow.

By Christy Lee March 06, 2024

Moscow has a range of military technologies that it could offer Pyongyang in exchange for munitions to sustain its war in Ukraine, with advanced missile technologies high on the list, analysts say.

North Korea has been providing munitions to Russia since its leader, Kim Jong Un, visited Russia last September and met with President Vladimir Putin.

Since September, Pyongyang has shipped about 6,700 containers of munitions to Russia, South Korean Defense Minister Shin Wonshik said at a press briefing on February 26. He said the containers could carry more than 3 million 152 mm artillery shells or 500,000 122 mm rounds.

Those munitions are making a difference on the battlefield. The Security Service of Ukraine said last month that North Korean ballistic missiles have been killing and injuring civilians since December.

Shin said that North Korea has cranked up its hundreds of munitions factories to operate "at full capacity," and that in return, Moscow is providing Pyongyang with raw materials and parts to manufacture weapons, in addition to food.

He also said Moscow is expected to transfer more military technology, which could embolden North Korea to escalate threats in the region.

South Korea's National Intelligence Agency said in November that Russia was the most likely source of technology that Pyongyang needed to launch its Malligyong-1 satellite into orbit the same month.

But the question remains as to what kind of weapons technology is Russia willing to send to North Korea that would increase the threat it poses to South Korea and the United States?

Analysts say Russia could provide technologies that would refine Pyongyang's nuclear and missile programs.

Michael O'Hanlon, director of research and foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, told VOA on Friday via email that Moscow most likely would provide missile technology to North Korea, "but nuclear weapons design information can't be ruled out."

What would concern South Korea the most would be short-range ballistic missile technology, including guidance systems, according to Bruce Bechtol, a former intelligence officer at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency who is now a political science professor at Angelo University in Texas.

"The North Koreans may be looking for technology that will help those missiles evade ballistic missile defenses as they're attacking the South," Bechtol said Monday during a phone interview with VOA. "The Russians do have that technology, and this is something that we must pay attention to."

Moscow's transfer of guidance and reentry capabilities of intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, would be the "most dangerous to the American homeland, according to David Maxwell, vice president of the Center for Asia Pacific Strategy.

"Advanced technology and capabilities to support an ICBM program" probably is "what North Korea wants the most," Maxwell told VOA during a telephone interview on Monday.

Analysts say Russia could also provide technologies that could enhance the development of satellite cameras, submarines, advanced fighter jets, air defense capabilities and tanks.

Bruce Bennett, a senior defense analyst at the Rand Corporation, told VOA in a telephone interview this week that Russia has technology that would allow North Korea to pack greater explosive power into a small warhead, but "may be reluctant to give North Korea sophisticated miniaturization technology."

Bennett said North Korea may have a nuclear warhead with 10 kilotons yield, but it probably does not have advanced miniaturization technology that could pack 350 kilotons of explosive power into a warhead like that of a U.S. Minuteman III ICBM.

Analysts say regardless of what weapons technology Russia transfers, it would be difficult to detect.

Bennett pointed out that Russian scientists seemed to have flown from Moscow to Pyongyang on a Russia military plane in September, two months before North Korea launched a spy satellite.

It could be difficult to discern if Russians spotted in Pyongyang are military experts now that North Korea has opened up its border to Russian tourists, said Bechtol.

Russian tourists visited North Korea in February for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic.

A North Korean IT delegation returned home on Friday after attending the Eurasia IT forum in Moscow, and a delegation on the North Korea-Russia joint committee on fisheries returned home on February 29 from Russia, according to KCNA, the state news agency of North Korea.

Additionally, Kim received a Russian-made vehicle from Putin on February 18, according to KCNA. Russian state media Tass on February 19 did not confirm the make or model, saying only that Kim examined an Aurus luxury car during his visit.