Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
The one and only J. A. Schumpeter: I know something of the government which preceeded Hitler… and I can only say that I am quite prepared to forgive him much by virtue of comparison. (1933) […] Nor am I a…
A piece of Soviet wit, to keep us entertained. A contaminated stanza from a Soviet children’s poem: Don’t be ashamed, o drunkard,Of your nose,For it is of the same colorAs our red banner. Perhaps I should write about Soviet “black”…
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…
As most of my readers probably know, Simon Sebag Montefiore, who teaches history at Cambridge, published Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar last year. The book may be of interest to non-Russian-speaking audiences in the West, but I’m going…
J. Cassian of Feb. 30 fame is back. Which takes us to the roots again: John Cassian was a venerable Church Father, but for some reason the Orthodox Church commemorates him on February 29. One can find most extravagant and…
In the comments to the previous entry, John Cassian reminds us that Thomas Carlyle’s History of Friedrich II of Prussia had among its fans Adolf Hitler himself — and, may I add, Kaiser Wilhelm II. Was it Frederick’s reputation as…
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…
Two years after the end of the first, failed Russian revolution, a group of Russian intellectuals published a collection of articles under the title Vekhi (Landmarks), which focused primarily on the Russian intelligentsia’s part in the 1905–1907 Revolution, the Russian…
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.…
According to the BBC, Russia and Tajikistan have signed an accord to make legal hundreds of thousands of Tajik migrants in Russia. That’s the introductory paragraph; the rest of the report is mostly whining and hand-wringing over the Tajik illegals’…
This link will send you to an article on Russian political history by Lord Skidelsky, but alas, The Moscow Times‘ links expire, more often than not, within a day or two of publication. Recommending the piece, I’m going to dwell…
In the 1920s, Nikolai Zabolotsky was a member of a literary group called OBERIU–perhaps the last close circle of young innovators in Russian literature. None of the major OBERIUTs, except Zabolotsky, survived the 1940s: most died in confinement. NZ, too,…