Althusser
Christopher Bray on Louis Althusser: …[S]ince in French “Louis” is pronounced exactly the same as the word for “he”, he had never thought of himself as an individual proper. Not exactly: the diphthongs in lui and Louis are supposed to…
Winterings in Trans-Scythia
Fragments of a blog
Winterings in Trans-Scythia
Fragments of a blog
Category EU
Dehmel
Jonathan Gaisman writes of Verklärte Nacht, Schoenberg’s early work (1899) based on a poem by Richard Dehmel: Looking at the poem on its purely literary merits, it is indeed difficult not to wince, or, at the mention of the man…
Japrisot and Salinger 4
Seeing that Himadri has a new post up discussing The Catcher in the Rye, I feel it’s time to wrap up my Japrisot and Salinger mini-series. A brief recap: The first and best-known Russian translation of The Catcher (1960) had…
“The antithesis of its own post-transitional success”
Mateusz Mazzini argues in Foreign Policy: The revisionist politics of the current Polish government plays right into Moscow’s hands. A rejection of multilateralism, strife with the EU, and growing antagonism with neighbors, notably Germany and Ukraine—all these features of Polish…
The MH17 trial: a rare chance for “the most inquisitorial” system
In the previous post, I suggested that a criminal trial in the Netherlands, and by analogy in other inquisitorial systems, could be regarded as a critical discussion of key documents in the pre-trial dossier, with both the defense and, ideally,…
Fact-finding at the MH17 trial: the dossier
Legally speaking, the MH17 trial should focus on the defendants’ guilt or innocence as well – if guilt is established – on the fitting sanctions on the offenders and compensation for the victims. In order to convict, however, the court…
Fact-finding at the MH17 trial
The joint investigation team working on the case of Flight MH17, the civilian plane downed in Eastern Ukraine five years ago, has charged four people with the murder of the plane’s 298 passengers. Three of the accused are Russian nationals;…
“The new professions”
In The Spiritualist Medium: A Study of Female Professionalism in Victorian America (1975), R. Laurence Moore of Cornell wrote: In his journal, [Ralph Waldo] Emerson included the spiritualist medium among the new professions that he believed had emerged in America…
Domovoys and farfadets
Prince Platon Shirinsky-Shikhmatov (1790-1853) served as Nicholas I’s minister of education in 1850-53, during some of the darkest years of that reign. Disturbed by the European revolutions of 1848-9, Nicholas succumbed to a sort of reactionary paranoia that debilitated all…
Byron was right
In 1809, Byron wrote a friend from Lisbon : I must just observe, that the village of Cintra in Estramadura is the most beautiful, perhaps, in the world. We also find an expression of this in Child Harold’s Pilgrimage: Lo! Cintra’s glorious…
Vigny’s fleet
Alfred de Vigny, the author of The Bottle to the Sea (La bouteille à la mer) and La frégate La Sérieuse, was not a man of the sea. He served in the French army – mostly with the royal guard…
Sit down. Look up.
Georges Barthouil on Leopardi’s attitude to travel: Leopardi was not a great traveller. In fact he imagined his foreign travels… Surely he had long wanted to escape his ancestral prison at Recanati in the Marches: However, escaping from a prison…