Comparability
Here’s what Prof. Hugh Ragsdale wrote in The National Interest in the fall of 1993: The tales of the brothers Grimm were characterized by W. H. Auden as something like morality plays in a different genre. He calls the tales of…
Winterings in Trans-Scythia
Fragments of a blog
Winterings in Trans-Scythia
Fragments of a blog
Category history
Communist Eugenics
Back in the 1970 late 1970s and the 1980s, Dmitry Galkovsky penned a collection of notes, somewhat in Vassily Rozanov’s style, which he entitled The Endless Dead End. Naturally, it could not be published at the time except by the…
Russian philosophy reviewed
Oliver Ready reviews Motherland: A Philosophical History of Russia by Lesley Chamberlain. A “philosophic history,” as I understand, means a history of philosophic thought here. “Lesley Chamberlain discusses why Western philosophy failed to take root in Russia,” the reviewer reports,…
A very brief biography
Time: the late 19th century. A young, beautiful German princess, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, is to marry a member of the Russian royal family. From the beginning, the spouses-to-be agree the marriage will require no physical intimacy: as it…
Liberal democracy: a nasal approach
From a post by a Russian LJ blogger–related to the recent jailing of a Swedish pastor for a sermon condemning homosexuality: The Soviet Union under Stalin embodied a favorite liberal principle, “the freedom of your fist ends at the tip…
No Rage, no Pride?
Apparently, no Russian publisher has printed a translation of Oriana Fallaci’s recent books, The Rage and the Pride and The Strength of Reason. Vagrius promised to publish one of them by June 2004, but it hasn’t appeared. Another publishing house,…
André Glucksmann and alternative Russian history
The aforementioned philosophe has published another one-sided, but this time mercifully brief, piece on Russian affairs, managing to squeeze in a true pearl. Die Pariser Salons standen dem nicht nach, allen voran Voltaire, der ohne falsche Rücksicht auf die Vergangenheit…
An excerpt from “The Birth of Liberty”
By G.P. Fedotov (1886, Saratov–1951, Bacon, NJ), a major Russian philosopher and historian. “Man is born free and dies in bonds.” There is nothing as false as this famous statement. Rousseau meant to say that freedom is the natural state…
[Dates and anniversaires]
A hundred years ago, on August 12, Alexei Romanov was born in a summer palace by the Gulf of Finland. Only a hundred years–it feels like a thousand: no continuity in Russia’s newest history, a race against time. But Prince…
Trotsky again
Almost by chance I stumbled across a year-old article at NRO by Stephen Schwartz (is this the Sufi Schwartz or a same-name?)–a somewhat confusing piece that ends in an unequivocal apologia of the author’s idol: To my last breath I…
More Russian pop poetry…
… or No disavowal for those in love A song from a still unboundedly popular Soviet musical comedy. Music by Mikael Tariverdiev, words by Veronika Tushnova, a talented Soviet poet (1915–1965). The stanzas in [brackets] are part of the original…
Two boys
There is an apparent similarity between the ordeals of two unfortunate princes, Louis XVII of France and Alexei Romanov of Russia. Both suffered at the hands of revolutionaries, and, according to official history, both died at an early age. Both…