Reading Fowles

A Maggot was the first book by John Fowles I had read. It was his last novel, published in 1985. Soon afterwards, I read The French Lieutenant’s Woman, first published in 1969. Much later, I added The Collector (1963) to…

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.…

Down with the old

Brick and mortar buildings like this, this, and this are a common sight in post-Soviet cities. They are colloquially called transformer booths because they house transformer (sub)stations. They are not all ugly but it’s understandable that some people would rather…

Dispatches from Antarctica

Via LanguageHat, the latest post on Maciej Cegłowski’s Idle Words blog. Gluten Free Antarctica seems to be the third installment of Cegłowski’s wonderful reminiscences of a voyage to “the only continent without a Michelin star.” The ship in question is Akademik Shokalsky (also spelled Shokalskiy), apparently…

Stages of settlement

Vasily Klyuchevsky’s A Course of Russian History (1902-04) was translated into English by C. J. Hogarth and published in 1911-31. All the five volumes can be found at archive.org by searching for Kluchevsky, without the first y. Judging by Volume I,…

“New Russia” revisited

In 2014 and 2016, I wrote several posts about Novorossiya (or Novorossia, or simply New Russia) as a historical term denoting certain areas to the north, northeast, and east of the Black Sea, as opposed to a latter-day political label. There…

Solzhenitsyn’s accent

Stephen Kotkin, the author of two biographical books on Stalin, wrote in this week’s issue of the Times Literary Supplement: Solzhenitsyn wrote it [The Gulag Archpelago] conspiratorially, in fragments, hiding his completed sections in the homes of trusted allies… In…

Another master

In 2010, Yuri Lyubimov, then 92, directed a production based on Tonino Guerra’s long poem Honey (Il miele). Guerra, who had turned 90, traveled to Moscow and opened one of the first performances with a brief talk. If memory serves,…

Nekrošius

Eimuntas Nekrošius, the great Lithuanian theater director, died in Vilnius on November 20 on the day before his 66th birthday. He was loved and revered by Russian theater-goers and theater-makers. He was one of the masters whose achievement made possible…

So much he could understand that you can’t

Luciano Mangiafico, a retired American diplomat and the author of two books and many more articles, wrote this in his 2013 piece on Giacomo Leopardi: Franco D’Intino, a professor of modern Italian literature at La Sapienza University in Rome, and…

They are usually wrong

To quote from a June 2016 post on this blog: Trump, it turns out, has consistently argued since at least 1990 that the terms of trade between the United States and its allies unfairly favor the latter because the US…