Hello, I'm James Wood, and this year on the LRB's Close Reading's podcast, I'm asking,

Who's Afraid of Realism? I'll be taking a range of great novels and short stories,

from Flobe's Madame Bovary and Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, up to more recent works

by Amit Chowdhury and Gwendolyn Riley. And I'll be examining what makes and makes

for the real. How does realism produce its effects? What's the difference between artifice

and artificiality? And who is and has been afraid of realism and why? The series starts with

two episodes on Madame Bovary, which you can listen to right now.

And in the third episode, I'll be talking to Adam Thurlwell about Dostoevsky.

You can find a link in the description, or search close readings, wherever you get your podcasts.

Thank you. Hello, welcome to the LRB podcast. I'm Daniel Saw, an editor at the London Review of Books,

and I'm very glad to be here with Sheila Fitzpatrick, a historian of the Soviet Union and, especially more recently, beyond it.

She's published more than 15 books, including two this year, lost souls about Soviet

displaced persons after the Second World War and the death of Stalin,

about the crazy things that happened after he left the scene.

The one I think really changed the field was everyday Stalinism, which came out in 1999.

It was a kind of lesson in history from below about what life was like for ordinary people.

She has also written 45 pieces for the LRB and we're very, very lucky to have her.

Hi, Sheila.

Hello.

So we're here to talk not only about your research and your most recent books and about Soviet history in general, but about you and your career, partly because it throws quite a lot of light on the later Cold War.

And of course, it throws light on the present too, partly because people doing research right now in the archives

in Moscow, found things a little harder after the war in Ukraine.

...