Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
If my calculations are correct, 37.4% of the eligible voters voted for Brexit in June and 39.7% of the eligible voters voted for Orbán’s immigration proposal last Sunday. However, the turnout for the Brexit referendum was 72%, with 52% voting…
Sergei M. Soloviev (or Solovyov; 1820-1879), the prominent Russian historian, graduated from the Moscow University in 1842 and spent the next two years traveling in Europe. The journey was made possible by his employment as the tutor to the children…
Alexei K. Tolstoy wrote A Mutiny in Vatican in 1864: The Castrati have rebelled.They walk into the Pope’s chambers:“Why aren’t we married?What’s our fault?” The Pope suggests “patching” his singers with cotton tissue, to which they object that the missing…
Rachel Cooke claims in a book review in The Guardian: German writer Norman Ohler’s astonishing account of methamphetamine addiction in the Third Reich changes what we know about the second world war. To some of us, it is not news…
When Brezhnev died in November 1982, he was almost 76 years old. Since the mid-1970s, he had been mocked for his apparent senility – approaching dementia – and for his slurred speech. Many Russians remember him as a decrepit wreck, unable to…
This paperback, Xǐnǎo Means Brainwashing, was published in the Soviet Union in 1977. The name of the author, “M. G. Stepanov,” sounds pseudonymic. The book is a highly critical review of Maoist ideology, propaganda and repression in China in the…
The Cultural Revolution began fifty years and six months ago, in May 1966. Paul Berman writes of Mao’s admirers in France and America: The flower of French intellectual life—Sartre, Foucault, and many others—aligned themselves with the Maoist cause in the…
H. L. Mencken wrote in The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1913) regarding the philosopher’s radical vegetarianism and belief in “natural methods of healing”: Nietzsche had read Emerson in his youth, and those Emersonian seeds which have come to full flower…
Erik McDonald provides more detail on the share of serfs in the Russian population before the great peasant reform of 1861. From a slightly different angle, one can claim with some justification that in 1678, two years after the death of…
Gary Saul Morson’s piece on Crime and Punishment at 150 at The New Criterion is not available for free except for this snippet at the beginning: Four years earlier [1861], the “tsar-liberator” Alexander II (reigned 1855–1881) had at last abolished serfdom, a…
For whatever reasons – ideological or scholarly or both – Noam Chomsky’s theory of generative grammar was not accepted into the mainstream of Soviet linguistics. On the other hand, the professor’s criticisms of US policies were a welcome addition to the…
In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Stephanie DeGooyer writes about Ada Ushpiz’s new documentary, Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt. Before focusing on the 2016 film, the reviewer makes a critical mention of an earlier one, Hannah Arendt…