Crazy Russians
The fearsome shaman’s march on Moscow has been interrupted – suspended – reversed perhaps – but echoes of his tambourine will be troubling the sleep of Kremlin denizens for some time. Why am I so sure? Because both they and…
Winterings in Trans-Scythia
Fragments of a blog
Winterings in Trans-Scythia
Fragments of a blog
Category history
Dr. Chekhov’s patients: Suvorin and Leskov
Early in 1892, Chekhov bought a modest estate in Melikhovo, forty miles south of Moscow. In March, he moved there from Moscow together with his parents and sister, and would live in Melikhovo until 1899. From time to time, he…
The MH17 trial: a rare chance for “the most inquisitorial” system
In the previous post, I suggested that a criminal trial in the Netherlands, and by analogy in other inquisitorial systems, could be regarded as a critical discussion of key documents in the pre-trial dossier, with both the defense and, ideally,…
Fanon’s Moscow observations
Alice Cherki, a friend and colleague of Frantz Fanon, writes in her memoir: Fanon went to Moscow in mid-January 1961. He had put on some weight, and his white cell count was substantially lower… [Dr. Michel] Martini remembers that Fanon…
Hong Kong puts Moscow to shame
It has been reported that hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million people have taken to the streets in Hong Kong to protest against a law that would make the city’s residents extraditable to China. A huge turnout for a city…
“A few things which I think are true and which I don’t think you can refute”
Forty years ago, Leon Edel – an expert on Henry James – sneered at Nabokov’s claim that the communist revolution in Russia completely destroyed the rule of law and took away all the limited but tangible liberties that Russians enjoyed…
“The new professions”
In The Spiritualist Medium: A Study of Female Professionalism in Victorian America (1975), R. Laurence Moore of Cornell wrote: In his journal, [Ralph Waldo] Emerson included the spiritualist medium among the new professions that he believed had emerged in America…
Domovoys and farfadets
Prince Platon Shirinsky-Shikhmatov (1790-1853) served as Nicholas I’s minister of education in 1850-53, during some of the darkest years of that reign. Disturbed by the European revolutions of 1848-9, Nicholas succumbed to a sort of reactionary paranoia that debilitated all…
An extinct breed
Reviewing To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture by Eleonory Gilburd, Jennifer Wilson writes in The New Republic: According to the nineteenth-century philosopher Georgy Fedotov, “a unified Europe had more reality on the banks of the…
Japrisot and Salinger 3
More on M. Blanchard’s adventures in France and other European countries. (Part 1; part 2.) Here’s a brief recap: J. D. Salinger published The Catcher in the Rye in 1951. Jean-Baptiste Rossi, later known as Sébastien Japrisot, translated it into…
Japrisot and Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye was published on July 16, 1951. A French version appeared two years later, perhaps the first translation into a major literary language. The translator was a young man, Jean-Baptiste Rossi, who had published his first…
Vereshchagin and Doukhobors
Last year, the Tretyakov gallery hosted a large-scale Vasily Vereshchagin retrospective. As a leading expert on the Russian empire’s Asian policy put it: Vereshchagin was also Russia’s Orientalist painter par excellence, using the adjective in the traditional art historical sense.…