Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
At last, a piece on the “alt-right” that doesn’t mention Dugin! Plus, it hinges on this worthwhile observation: The alt-right’s love of Europeanism blends racial politics with a quasi-religious faith in a pan-European identity. Says Devin Burghart, vice president of the Institute for…
Finally, after two preliminary posts, a longer excerpt from Mikhail Kuzmin’s 1922 review of Theatrical Workshop’s Gondla. (And I haven’t yet gotten to the Khlebnikov part.) The original text can be found here, as part of a collection of Kuzmin’s…
In June 1916, the Russian poet Nikolai Gumilev (Gumilyov) arrived at a sanatorium in the Crimea for treatment of a lung disease. In the army since the start of the war (he volunteered in August 1914), Gumilev had been twice promoted…
Marina Warner’s recent post on the LRB blog has tempted me to write about Russian theater and about bobeobi, but I don’t know where to start. Let’s say the Russian theater is enjoying yet another golden, or at least gilded,…
On a lighter note, a small selection of Soviet jokes from the recently declassified CIA documents, “Soviet Jokes for the DDCI” (deputy director of central intelligence). I’m not sure if I heard numbers two and three; the rest are familiar…
Reviewing T. J. Binyon‘s biography of Pushkin, James Wood remarked in 2003: It is in some ways unfortunate that Tchaikovsky set Eugene Onegin to music, not Rossini, the composer of deep shallows. Pushkin, according to T.J. Binyon’s remarkable biography, became…
One If you were in the real estate business in NYC, London or Toronto in the late 1980s, the 1990s or the noughties, there’s no way you could have avoided dealing with shady operators of Soviet or third-world extraction. I…
Max Boot writes in his latest NYT op-ed: Mr. Trump himself is doing nothing to dispel suspicions with his hyperbolic attacks and his denials that he has business interests in Russia — when his dealings there go back decades. So…
Until this year, I did not realize how many Russian translations of Thomas Moore’s poetry had been produced in the 19th century, especially its first half. For details, I recommend two investigations into the subject (in Russian): Mikhail Alexeyev’s 1982…
I doubt that Zhukovsky was deeply taken in by Thomas Moore’s oriental romance, with the likely exception of the Peri poem. But the “Lalla Rookh” fête in Berlin undoubtedly made a lasting impression on him, as if a furtive draft from some…
Schumann’s second oratorio, Der Rose Pilgerfahrt (The Pilgrimage of the Rose, 1851) is firmly set on European soil: it begins with elves in a round dance on Midsummer hearing a quite, plaintive voice, the voice of the Rose. In contrast,…
My fondest musical memory of the year 2016 will probably be the April, 16, performance of Schumann’s oratorio Das Paradies und die Peri by the Russian National Orchestra and the Popov Academy choir directed by Mikhail Pletnev. I expected something…