Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Here’s my superficial reading of the “Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act.” Apart from relatively minor tightenings of the screws (which might nonetheless hurt a good deal), there are three major innovations, as far as I can see: (a) The…
Himadri C., the Argumentative Old Git, is taking another look at Turgenev’s Smoke, a short novel from 1867. (Old Smoke links: Erik McDonald; yours most humbly.) Back in 1830, Pushkin had Tatiana tell Onegin, at a point when it was…
From Erik McDonald’s translation of It Didn’t Come Off (1867) by Ol’ga N. (Sophie Engelhardt, 1828-1894): Once I started a sentence this way: “I think…” Madame Petitpierre, my governess, interrupted me: “You think? In that case you will have dinner in…
A follow-up on my previous post on the Russian lawyer (“V”) who met with Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner last year. It bears repeating that, while it was a run of the mill meeting of the sort every politician takes…
Due diligence and background checks are sometimes as indispensable as an antiseptic liquid or protective gloves. Some people are literally contagious; others are metaphorically toxic. It may be tempting for a germaphobe’s son to ignore these precautions but prudence shouldn’t…
Erik McDonald is translating a novella by Sophie (Sof’ia) Engelhardt (Engel’gardt), nėe Novosil’tseva (1828-1894), a Russian author who published her fiction under the pen name Ol’ga N. In 2016, Erik translated another long story by Ol’ga N., The Old Man, now available as a free .mobi…
Putin was born 60 years after Franco (October 1952, December 1892) and was appointed prime minister 60 years after Franco was installed in Madrid (August 1999, March 1939). Chronologically, Franco’s 1959, the year of the Stabilization and Liberalization Plan, which…
This is a bizarre piece overall but its ending is simply unbelievable: But Obama also signed the secret finding… authorizing a new covert program… The cyber operation is still in its early stages and involves deploying “implants” in Russian networks…
Andrei Kolesnikov of the Carnegie Moscow Center comments in Vedomosti on Putin’s latest media appearances: A president without a program, reasoning like a common man, in the unwritten memoir genre – all that against the backdrop of a political class deliberating if March…
In his 1886 etymological dictionary of Slavic languages, Franz von Miklosich (Franc Miklošič) derives šapka (czapka) from Medieval Latin cappa but also mentions “Turkish šabka.” Miklošič was one of Max Vasmer’s sources for the etymology of шапка. Four decades later, Alexander Brückner…
The Russian word шапка “hat” is ultimately derived from Latin cappa “head-covering” according to Vasmer. The likely route is via Old French and Middle High German. Čapka (Czech) and czapka (Polish) begin with a “tch” sound because in Old French, “ch”…
To add to my recent note on Anselm Kiefer’s new Khlebnikov-inspired exhibition and to my earlier posts on the poet (Jakobson reading K.; Bobeobi 0, 1, and 2), two excerpts from Notes on Poetry by Osip Mandelshtam (1923): Modern Russian…