The Magazine that Almost Changed the World

Bruce, a contributor to both my blogs, recommended this article about a book about a revolutionary magazine. I'm going to look for it - it sounds fascinating.

The book is “Molla Nasreddin: The Magazine that Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve,” and its subject is the aforementioned Molla Nasreddin, a “satirical Azeri periodical” published in the first three decades of the last century in Azerbaijan and “read across the Muslim world from Morocco to Iran.” Nasreddin is a traditional character dating back to the Middle Ages in Central Asia, and he served as the magazine’s unifying figure. The book, which gathers some of the best images and guides the reader through their cultural nuances, is a project of the international artists’ collective Slavs and Tatars, who describe themselves as “a faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. The collective’s work spans several media, disciplines, and a broad spectrum of cultural registers (high and low) focusing on an oft-forgotten sphere of influence between Slavs, Caucasians, and Central Asians.

The illustrations in the article intrigued me.

The captions for the left and right pages, respectively, are “According to the book, the world of the devil,” and “According to the book, the world of believers.” “With the bicycles, cars, bridges and buildings, the world of the devil is modern and developed,” the editors write. “The world of believers is full of ethereal illusions and idleness.”

More at The New Yorker