A nasty anecdote
Some three weeks ago, Himadri (the Argumentative Old Git) wrote about the change in his perception of Bruckner’s symphonies, which he used to love as a young man: But it struck me recently that it has been a long time…
Winterings in Trans-Scythia
Fragments of a blog
Winterings in Trans-Scythia
Fragments of a blog
Tag Turgenev
Tyutchev and Turgenev in their late 40s
Tyutchev (1803-1873) wrote this poem in July 1850, at 46, possibly still in the grip of depression but already on the brink of a new life (which would end in a series of disasters in 1864-5). I thought of it…
Subterranean work
In 1877, Nikolai Nekrasov wrote an epigram, To the Author of Anna Karenina: Tolstoy, you have proven with patience and talentThat a woman should not have affairsEither with a sub-chamberlain or with an aide-de-campWhen she’s a wife and a mother.…
“It was his book that had irritated me”
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…
More Turgenev trivia
Following up on this, I must admit haven’t read the dramatic trilogy, The Coast of Utopia by Tom Stoppard, and I’m not sure I’m going to, any time soon. The brothers Ostrovsky, who translated the work into Russian, faced difficult…
Ancient Russians abroad
If Henry James was the grand master of the Americans Abroad novel, Turgenev probably deserves the first prize in the pre-1917 Russians Abroad nomination. Other Russian majors used that setting, Gogol in Nights on the Villa, Dostoevsky in The Gambler,…
Digestive metaphors for a healthy nation
Sozont I. Potugin, the character from Turgenev’s The Smoke quoted by Dmitry Bykov and Erik McDonald and discussed here and here on this blog, had much more sensible views than his grumbling remarks had initially suggested. Consider this exchange from…
Turgenev trivia
Going back to Erik McDonald’s latest post with this quote from Dmitry Bykov, But except for the Sochi Olympics, Russia hasn’t made any powerful contributions to international culture recently, I’m not sure the Sochi Olympics was a contribution to anything but…
Turgenev as a household name
“The only thing you never turned you hand to // Was teaching English in a boarding school,” wrote Auden in his 1937 Letter to Lord Byron from Iceland. Dmitry Bykov, an influential and remarkably prolific Russian columnist, novelist and poet,…
Recommended reading
J. Cassian has translated Fear, a story by Guy de Maupassant. P.S. As J.C. points out, Maupassant wrote (at least) two stories entitled La Peur; this one is the lesser known. Knowing that lots of Maupassant have been translated into…
Ace, or the interlinguistic variation of brand names
Ace is a line of non-chlorine whitening detergents manufactured by Procter & Gamble and marketed in Europe (Western and Eastern), Middle East and Africa. It is in the National Health Institute’s household product database, so it might be available in…