Category arts

No holy fool II

Following up on the Karamazovs, an obvious remark. It is said that Dostoevsky’s portrayal of women was lacking next to his male characters. It is not generally true – The Idiot is a counterexample – but The Brothers Karamazov is…

No holy fool

On Hope by Tara Isabella Burton in the Hedgehog Review: In order to accept our lives as a comedy, we must accept that none of us are the heroes we imagine ourselves to be. This is the truth understood by…

Presentiment

Of nothing in particular. Ruins of Ivan Zholtovsky’s puzzling pavilion, grainy rain clouds above, a pop-artsy fence, and tired, lifeless grass in the foreground: Dusk in Gorky Park. By way of explanation, a quote by Alexandra Selivanova pasted from this…

Blok in the dialect of Brescia

At Language Hat‘s, a link to and discussion of Alexander Blok in Dialèt Bresà, a translation or “transplantation” of Alexander Blok’s famous poem, Night, Street, Lamp, Drugstore, into a Gallo-Italic language, by Valentina Gosetti. The language is her native dialect,…

That mural sea

Reviewing Evgeny Boratynsky and the Russian Golden Age by Anatoly Liberman, Sibelan Forrester remarks: Russians who read Anglophone poetry in the Soviet period turned to the works available, which were largely translations or original editions of poetry from the era…

No Dryden, no Pope and no Gray’s “Elegy”

For English-language coverage of the protests in Russia, I’d probably recommend Kevin Rothrock‘s Twitter feed as a starting point. What’s different about this year’s Navalny-triggered protests are the high participation rate (relative to the population) outside of Moscow and St.…

“An old, proven method”

Do I hate him? Do I hate the dictator in the Kremlin (or in a bunker)? Of course I do. But it’s both an over- and understatement. The dictator is a pathetic little man, old and infirm; a small-minded man…

Plenty of perjury

Sergei Dovlatov once remarked: “In Soviet newspapers, only misprints are truthful.” His first example was gavnokomanduyushchiy instead of glavnokomanduyushchiy — “Commander-in-Shit” for “Commander-in-Chief,” roughly speaking. Dovlatov did not live to witness the spread of spell checkers and autocorrectors. We’re all…

A post-Constructivist monster

This is a low-resolution view of Moscow from the Yauzsky boulevard, less than half a mile from the building I discussed in these two posts. I’m partial to this shot because it reveals (I hope) so much about the city…