Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
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,…
…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:…
Back in 1831, a young French gentleman took a boat to New York, planning to study American penal institutions. He spent nine months in the States of North America, met people from various walks of life and in due course…
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…
By pure chance, I’ve came across a review of Elaine Feinstein’s biography of Akhmatova by Neal Ascherson, a former Observer observer. Speaking of Akhmatova’s only son, Ascherson notes parenthetically: The embittered Lev Gumilev grew up to be the ultra-nationalist historian…
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…
From Letters of a Russian Traveller by Nikolai M. Karamzin (1793): The town is rather small and, apart from the duke’s castle, one can’t find a single huge house here. — I was interrogated at the town gate, after which…
Once you’ve mentioned the Civil War and Revolution, there’s no end in sight. I have dug up a quote from Alain Besançon (a French historian and former “Sovietologist”) that has struck me as a grotesque distortion every time I‘ve though…
I have argued that the anti-Communist movement that eventually prevailed in Poland was (in essence or in a large part) healthily nationalistic and religiously conservative. I have also commented on Christopher Hitchens’ adoration of Leon Trotsky. Now The American Conservative…
Now that the White General Anton Denikin and the White philosopher Ivan Ilyin have been reinterred in Moscow with proper pomp, it is painfully amusing to recall that two decades ago, Moscow propaganda painted as degenerate murderers the White generals…
…bear in mind that the Russian Revolution of 1917, the ensuing Civil War of 1918–1922, the Collectivization of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and the Great Terror of the 1930s each and all had a severe, unprecedented dysgenic impact…
Just before the second Iraqi War began, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the mighty Liberal (indeed) Democratic Party of Russia, recorded a song. Yes, a rap-ish quasi-song warning President Bush in forceful terms against the invasion. Its title was, if…