Category arts

A. C. Douglas

The gentleman who went by A. C. Douglas on the net had a wonderful blog, Sounds & Fury. The site – the & in its title replaced with and – is now operated by an opera lover who is obviously…

“Age seven is the top of life”

Here‘s the Russian artist Pavel Pepperstein portrayed as a boy by his father, Viktor Pivovarov. Here’s Pavel’s face on a temp fence around the ruins of the Gear Pavillion in what used to be the Gorky Park in Moscow. Still…

Too good for this life

Sobyanin seems to be consistent in his plan to make Moscow's residential districts as humanly unlivable as possible. He hates trees and low-rise buildings but adores barren skyscraper blocks based on the ugliest Chinese models.

Here be monsters

This picture was taken in Moscow in the early 2010s. I hope they have painted over this graffiti: every time I look at it, it scares the bejeezus out of me. On the other hand, I won’t be surprised if…

Shipwrecked in his own bed

In 2013, Brazilian writer and translator Ronaldo Bressane reviewed a translation of Oblomov by Rubens Figueiredo. Caution: this book is extremely dangerous. A genuine affront to society. Reading it can poison you with a diabolical languor… a sweet apathy… a…

Felicity’s ghosts

Madame de Genlis appears twice in War and Peace. First, as the author of books for children, “de nombreux ouvrages édifiants à l’usage de la jeunesse” to quote Wikipedia, much disliked by some of her involuntary readers for her oppressive…

Alexandrian challenges

Back to where I left off last time. In his comments to Propertius III:15, John Kevin Newman remarked: Propertius is sentimental, but evidently sentiment does not exclude cruelty. To this observation, Newman supplies a footnote quoting from The Brothers Karamazov:…

Khlebnikov and Beuys

Not that I know much about Joseph Beuys‘s work but this episode from his younger years – perhaps invented – keeps interjecting itself into my random thoughts. Actually, I’m pretty sure he did invent it now. Here’s the deal: When…

“Here everything rhymes”

Osip Mandelstam wrote in 1933 in Conversation about Dante: Would you like to become acquainted with the lexicon of Italian rhymes? Take the entire Italian dictionary and leaf through as you please. Here everything rhymes. Every word cries out to…

Poor Icarus

Turning away from Auden’s Icarus, if only for a moment. What follows is my approximate prose rendering, line by line, of a poem written in Russian in 1984 or a little earlier. Its  author, Dmitry Shagin, is a major figure…