Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
The Catcher in the Rye was published on July 16, 1951. A French version appeared two years later, perhaps the first translation into a major literary language. The translator was a young man, Jean-Baptiste Rossi, who had published his first…
A Maggot was the first book by John Fowles I had read. It was his last novel, published in 1985. Soon afterwards, I read The French Lieutenant’s Woman, first published in 1969. Much later, I added The Collector (1963) to…
Last year, the Tretyakov gallery hosted a large-scale Vasily Vereshchagin retrospective. As a leading expert on the Russian empire’s Asian policy put it: Vereshchagin was also Russia’s Orientalist painter par excellence, using the adjective in the traditional art historical sense.…
Brick and mortar buildings like this, this, and this are a common sight in post-Soviet cities. They are colloquially called transformer booths because they house transformer (sub)stations. They are not all ugly but it’s understandable that some people would rather…
Stephen Kotkin, the author of two biographical books on Stalin, wrote in this week’s issue of the Times Literary Supplement: Solzhenitsyn wrote it [The Gulag Archpelago] conspiratorially, in fragments, hiding his completed sections in the homes of trusted allies… In…
Eimuntas Nekrošius, the great Lithuanian theater director, died in Vilnius on November 20 on the day before his 66th birthday. He was loved and revered by Russian theater-goers and theater-makers. He was one of the masters whose achievement made possible…
I’ve linked before to James Wood’s review of Pushkin: A Biography by T.J. Binyon. I’m linking to it again for this observation: Sylvia Plath once longed to write a poem that might be roomy enough to include a toothbrush. But…
A few weeks ago, at an airport, I heard a lady instruct her kids over the phone to not use a floordrobe the coming night. A much-needed word! The next moment, I thought of a 101-year-old Russian poem: Truly, at…
A Daughter of Albion is a short story by Anton Chekhov. It was first published in 1883 in Nikolai Leykin’s magazine, Fragments (or Shards, perhaps more precisely). Up until 1888 Chekhov was known to the Russian public primarily as the…
There’s a Soviet joke – probably of Russo-Jewish origin like many Soviet jokes – that goes this way, approximately (the original Russian is grammatically imperfect): Let go of Daddy’s foot, kids, and stop swinging! He didn’t hang himself for this,…
And now for a lighter note. While Googling “John Bayley” & “Wuthering Heights” yesterday, I stumbled on this: The greats we hateSpectator writers and others on the classic books they most dislike Christopher Howse, The Spectator‘s religion columnist, confesses: I…
Innokenty Annensky wrote in The Second Book of Reflections (1909, Brand-Ibsen, pp. 173-179): Perhaps what’s captivating in Brand is that Brand does not fear being a psychological absurdity from time to time, that we’re judging Brand, marvel at him, go…