Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Googling “Putin critic” turns up reports of a Russian defector assassinated in Ukraine; of a memorial to a Russian opposition leader killed near the Kremlin; of the current opposition leader jailed for a street protest; of a Russian investigative journalist who…
Tom the Amateur Reader, the author of the Wuthering Expectations blog, quotes from the 1970 collection of translations from Alexander Blok by Jon Stallworthy and Peter France: I am nailed to a bar with liquor. It’s the first line of this…
My latest two cents considering Obama the Cunctator and Trump the (hopefully) Knot Cutter. One Manufacturing regime change out of stagnant air is not, generally speaking, a sound suggestion. Smartly supporting a groundswell of discontent is a different matter. On…
The Economist wrote in November 2014 considering the proposal that Russian banks be disconnected from the SWIFT payment system: Now there are calls for Russian banks to be banned from SWIFT in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A group…
Good reporting by Howard Amos, a Moscow-based freelancer, and Jim Heintz of Associated Press. Russians are taking to the streets under anti-corruption slogans, and not just in Moscow and St. Petersburg: Navalny and his Foundation for Fighting Corruption had called…
Reviewing five recent books on the Russian Revolution of 1917 for the LRB, Sheila Fitzpatrick quotes S. A. [Stephen Anthony] Smith, professor of history at All Souls College, Oxford: The Soviet Union proved capable of generating extensive growth in industrial…
In The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success, Geoffrey Lewis mentions a certain late-Ottoman author and civil servant: …Kemalpaşazade Sait, alias Lâstik (‘Galoshes’) Sait, who held several senior posts in government service but was best known as a writer of…
The sculptor Paolo Troubetzkoy was born in 1866 in Intra, by Lago Maggiore in the north of Italy, to Ada Winans, an American pianist and singer, and Petr (Pyotr) Petrovich Trubetskoy, a Russian diplomat of aristocratic lineage. Paolo grew up…
Good to hear about Russian entrepreneurs doing something cutting-edge and producing something immediately marketable: Amid the satellites, virtual reality headsets, 3D printers and other hi-tech products on show at Skolkovo’s recent Startup Bazaar, the stand housing a cage of buzzing…
About two weeks ago, Mark Townsend wrote in The Guardian: Another Briton said to have had an influential intervention in the US elections is 52-year-old Jim Dowson, a Scottish Calvinist who founded the far right, anti-Muslim party Britain First. Dowson, from…
The Economist‘s Erasmus wrote last Sunday about the “row” concerning Saint Isaac’s Cathedral in Saint Petersburg: After the Bolshevik revolution a century ago, [the building] became a museum, dedicated at various times to science, atheism or simply its own history.…
I’ve come across an English translation of Zhukovsky’s comment on his 1821 poem, Lalla Rookh – not a Russian version of Thomas Moore’s long work but a lyrical essay on beauty and imagination. The brief prose note complements the poem. The book…