Who shall surpass me?
Motherland I hate; I love the ideal of Man. That’s Valery Bryusov, 1896. Students of Russian poetry who focus on three to five names in the 20th century may not realize how much Bryusov (from Bruce, like the kings of…
Winterings in Trans-Scythia
Fragments of a blog
Winterings in Trans-Scythia
Fragments of a blog
Category arts
Aquarium, 1996
From a 1996 song by Aquarium: It used to be: God rode above,a petty demon jumped below.Now we’re all equal,we’re all anonymous. Through a hole in the heavensa white Mercedes drove in,passed out three rubles to everyoneand moved on. (Maxim…
Vail on Rimsky-Korsakov
Peter Vail, a distinguished Russian émigré writer, speaks of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Kitezh: Fortunately, this historical injustice is being removed now. Rimsky-Korsakov created The Tale of the Invisible City of Kitezh as a national idea. No doubt Wagner was an influence on…
Mikhail Kuzmin
From Alexandrian Songs (1906). This, and more Kuzmin here. In spring the poplar changes its leaves.In spring Adonis returnsfrom the kingdom of the dead…And you – where’re you going in spring, my joy? In spring they will all go ridingin…
Elena Shvarts [“For seven days, for seven nights”]
Before the translation, two comments. Note 1 (source) Already during the Northern War [Russia vs. Sweden, 1700—1721] a Russian corps under Apraksin’s command made a 130-km ice march from the island of Cotlin to the Finnish coast in order to…
“Soviet” Russian art: Lianozovo
I have claimed that, in the last decades of Communist rule, only underground visual artists produced work of lasting value. Of these artists, the two I would name first are Anatoly Zverev (1931–1986) and Oskar Rabin (Oscar Rabine, b. 1928).…
A Russian author on crime in France
Anatoly Gladilin (Anatol Gladiline), a Soviet Russian writer, left the Soviet Union in 1976 and has since lived in Paris. Back in the 1960s, he was, along with Vasily Aksionov, one of the most famous and promising young Russian authors.…
Heart vs. Soul
And thus the evil heart is tempting Psyche’s pure dreams – And Psyche, in response: “O the earthly, “Of the celestial what do you know?” Khodasevich, in the times of the New Economic Policy, which he couldn’t stand.
Just to quote something radical
Georgy Ivanov, the one to become the best Russian poet of the Void, wrote some time after the 1917 Revolution: I’m for the war and foreign intervention; I’m for the Czar, even a dead man. The Russian intelligentsia To the…
Slavophiles and the decline of the West
Generally speaking, Russian Slavophiles (a misnomer) did not summarily condemn the West — they only thought the West had strayed away from its precious roots, and it was time for Russia to pick up the torch. “The world is going…
Did anybody notice that…
From the end of WWII to the late 1980s, while the Soviet government continued censoring and filtering all works of art and letters before making them available to the public, the censorship had a rather different impact on different arts.…
Ksenia of St. Petersburg
Another poem by Elena Shvarts, this time on the Blessed Ksenia (Xenia) of St. Petersburg, whose husband died suddenly in the middle of a drinking party, and who insisted on wearing his clothes and being called by his name for…