Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Say “the noise of time” to a Russianist or a literary-aware Russian, and the instant response will be: Mandelstam. This reaction is hardly universal. As Nikil Saval writes: Julian Barnes’s new novel, “The Noise of Time,” is about Shostakovich… The novel’s title…
In his memoir, Lighted Windows (1978), Veniamin Kaverin recalls scenes from Pskov in the first days after the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd: Kostya von der Bellen was a student from our class. He was very short, important-looking, jug-eared. A line from Chekhov’s notebooks – “A tiny…
In his grotesque sci-fi novelette The Fatal Eggs (1923), Mikhail Bulgakov wrote of …the theater of the late Vsevolod Meyerhold, who died, as everybody knows, in 1927, during the staging of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, when a platform [lit. trapezes] with naked…
Donald Rayfield, the British Russianist and the author of Stalin and His Hangmen, reviews On Stalin’s Team by Sheila Fitzpatrick: Two myths lie behind Stalin’s rehabilitation in Russia. One is that he won the second world (or “great patriotic”) war —…
Going back to Timothy Snyder’s piece, what about the top man in the Kremlin? Last December, Putin said this about Trump (in The Guardian‘s translation): He is a very colorful and talented man, no doubt about that… He says that he…
Excellent reporting by Olga Khazan in The Atlantic: Why Soviet Refugees Aren’t Buying Sanders’s Socialism. She has interviewed some older-generation Americans of Soviet-Jewish extraction and found them categorically opposed to Sanders and leaning towards Trump. It seems at times that…
You bet. Not quite the way there were officially supposed to, but very much the way they were predicted to work. I’m talking about the import bans that Russia imposed in August 2014 on food produced in the EU? As…
Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) was a famous German performance artist of the post-WWII era. According to his Wiki entry, From 1943 on he was deployed as rear-gunner in the Ju 87 “Stuka” dive-bomber, initially stationed in Königgrätz, later in the eastern Adriatic…
There’s an ongoing discussion of whether statues of Cecil Rhodes should be removed from the university campuses in Cape Town and Oxford. In their letters to The London Review of Books, Marina Warner and John Barnie point at the approach…
Professor Michael D. Gordin writes of the physiologist Ivan Pavlov: The son of a priest in Riazan, a provincial city almost two hundred kilometres south-east of Moscow, the young Ivan Petrovich seemed destined for the cloth. Yes, but not merely…
In 1979, when Stalin turned 100, Stephen Cohen published an excellent article about Soviet de- and (partial) re-Stalinization in The New Republic. Describing Khruschev’s boldest criticism of the despot, later reversed under Brezhnev, Cohen observed: The vaunted generalissimo became a criminally…
Robert Service on Stalin’s funeral in Stalin: a Biography: The funeral took place on 9 March. It was a cold, dry, grey day of late winter. The sun did not appear. Frost was heavy. The crowds were dense… The Imperial regime had…