Blok, “Nailed to the Bar”
I’m taking liberties with a 1908 poem by Alexander Blok. Nailed to the bar,dead drunk. What do I care?Ah look — my bliss there, on a sleighgone into silvery smoke. Flying on the sleigh, drowned in the snowof times, the…
Winterings in Trans-Scythia
Fragments of a blog
Winterings in Trans-Scythia
Fragments of a blog
Category arts
Tyutchev at 25
Fyodor Tyutchev is customarily ranked half a notch below Pushkin and Lermontov in the Russian literary tradition — along with Afanasy Fet (Foeth), the last of the Golden Age of Russian poetry. Ask the wise, and you may hear that…
Febyouarie 10, Febrewery 10
I don’t have the drive to write on Fridays. Here’s two bits: I hear that Andrew Young, the author of Siberian Light, has started a new weblog, Taking Aim. Siberian Light was named Best CIS Blog at AFOE last year…
Symbolical exchange and oil
The great Victor Pelevin, in A Macedonian Critique of French Thought (it’s a pity Slavoj Zizek is Slovenian), tells a phantasmagorical tale of a certain Kika, a graduate of Sorbonne’s philosophy department and the son of a Russian Tatar oligarch,…
When G.K.’s sense of humor failed him
G.K.Chesterton in Autobiography: It was at the house of Lady Juliet Duff; and among the guests was Major Maurice Baring, who had brought with him a Russian in uniform; who talked in such a way as to defy even the…
M.L. & B.M. [Gasparov]
The 20th century produced two outstanding Russian scholars of the same name, Gasparov. Mikhail L. Gasparov, the linguist, translator and literary scholar, died in Moscow last month. Boris M. Gasparov, a culturologist if I may call him so, teaches at…
Breathe, dear, while you can
Among the books I read as a child of school age, there was a certain one by a Soviet author titled In Template’s Country (V strane Trafareta). It was intended as an allegory of a capitalist country’s miserable existence (otherwise,…
Boris Godunov and the Time of Troubles, 2012–2016
By way of an epigraph, a confession from a Russian music forum: Fidelio… The singers poured beer on each other… or threw beer cans — I don’t remember which and don’t want to recall. Act II began with Florestan lying…
My problem with Schnittke
J. Cassian discusses Norman Lebrecht’s recent dismissal of Mozart as a “progenitor of Muzak.” (A.C. Douglas recommends that the critic up his meds.) “Mozart, it is safe to say, failed to take music one step forward,” according to Norman L.…
John Cassian is back
…and here’s one of his, ahem, favorite Thinkers talking. Darwinism implies that the only eternal life we have is in the recycling of our atoms. I find that comforting. That’s George Monbiot, straight out of Chekhov or Dostoevsky or Turgenev:…
Not an old fool: an antithesis
Neal Ascherson gets a free pass from me for this: But icons are difficult to write about critically. How good a poet was she really? To me as a non-Russian, her contemporary Marina Tsvetaeva seems as a writer to be…
Bad news from Moscow and Dorset
I don’t write about Russian politics and society much these days. It hurts, in a way. There’s been bad news from the culture front as well: two gentlemen passed away in November whose influence on Russian letters was considerable and…