Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Andrei Illarionov was a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity for fourteen years, from October 2006 to early 2021. From 2000 to 2005, he served as a senior economic adviser to president Putin of…
It’s good to know that Russia’s number one opposition leader supports an expansive understanding of free speech. Navalny may be wrong on Trump versus Twitter but it’s far more important – in the Russian context – that he get the…
This post, like my second post of the year 2021, has been prompted by Language Hat’s Lost Yiddish Words and its comments section. I’ll start with a quote from a 2011 post at Yiddish Word of the Week. Fascinatingly, at…
Antero de Quental was a major Portuguese poet active in the second half of the 19th century. Late last December, I came across a translation of one of his last sonnets into Russian by a highly competent scholar, a classicist…
In one of his December 2020 posts, Lost Yiddish words, LanguageHat quoted Rose Waldman’s recent piece in Tablet: I had grown up on Hasidic Yiddish. The Yiddish I spoke (and speak) is homey and friendly and gives me a sense…
It’s been more than ten years since Hugo Chávez’s last visit to Moscow. He spent some of his time being driven around the Russian capital in a red Lada Priora and helped unveil the foundation stone for an equestrian statue…
Google Photos keeps reminding me of times when travel was still possible and I was younger. Nine years ago, I wasn’t using geotagging – although I could and should have turned it on – so I’m not even sure where…
Apparently, one of the bigger Brexiteer bugbears has been the belief that a Briton could be criminally prosecuted for breaking the EU directive on the production and sale of marmalade, jam and other preserves (Council Directive 2001/113/EC) – and, crucially,…
From Farmers Weekly, a British magazine: A land value tax could be introduced in Scotland as part of the country’s ongoing reform journey. The proposals are included in the Land and property taxation in Scotland: Initial scoping of options for…
Sergei Dovlatov once remarked: “In Soviet newspapers, only misprints are truthful.” His first example was gavnokomanduyushchiy instead of glavnokomanduyushchiy — “Commander-in-Shit” for “Commander-in-Chief,” roughly speaking. Dovlatov did not live to witness the spread of spell checkers and autocorrectors. We’re all…
Via Arts and Letters Daily, an introduction into Futurist Cuisine by Ayun Halliday. The culinary-minded Futurists in question were Italian, not Russian: they attacked pasta and wished it replaced with meat. Bread against meat is an ancient dichotomy. My interest…
Shortly after watching a performance of Timofey Kulyabin‘s production of The Broken Pitcher (or The Broken Jug) – a remarkably well thought through interpretation – I learned that Kleist had been thinking of Oedipus Rex while writing his comedy: The…