Russians are serious about literature

In the most dramatic Russian literary killing since a dispute over Kant turned deadly last year, a man allegedly stabbed an acquaintance for preferring prose to poetry. RIA Novosti has this report: “A former teacher was detained in Russia’s Urals after being accused of stabbing an acquaintance to death in a dispute about literary genres, investigators said Wednesday. The 67-year-old victim insisted that ’the only real literature is prose,’ the Sverdlovsk Region’s branch of the Investigative Committee said. The victim’s assertion outraged the 53-year-old suspect, who favored poetry, and the dispute ended with the ex-teacher stabbing his friend to death, investigators said.”