By Eugene Ehren
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Poem translated: “The Prophet” by Mikhail Lermontov Keenly aware of his profound alienation from society and the tragic fate allotted to him, the Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov had a prophetic sense of his own destiny. His poem “The Prophet” (1841) was a response to, and a continuation of, an identically named poem by Russia’s greatest
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Book in the spotlight: Bagazh: Memoirs of a Russian Cosmopolitan by Nicolas Nabokov Sharing a last name with a literary sensation is a mixed blessing when you want to write a book of your own. On the one hand, you get an advance that lets you soar above the teeming hordes of literary unknowns whose
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Book in the spotlight: Stalin’s Scribe by Brian J. Boeck Of the five 20th-century Russian writers awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Mikhail Sholokhov was the most controversial choice. This is for two reasons. First, Sholokhov’s claim to fame depended entirely on his epic And Quiet Flows the Don, and he would have never been
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Book in the spotlight: The New Leviathans by John Gray John Gray is one of those thinkers who can criticize mainstream thought and still get his books reviewed by the establishment. Doubtless this is because, however trenchant his criticism of liberalism, he is firmly committed to liberal values, insofar as they denote a willingness to
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Book in the spotlight: Gathering Evidence by Thomas Bernhard No one acquainted with Thomas Bernhard’s fiction will ever suspect its author of having been a happy person. Bernhard’s typical narrator is corrosively caustic, stridently vituperative, and all-around misanthropic; and he has a very low opinion of the human race, especially the part of it that
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Book in the spotlight: I Knew a Man Who Knew Brahms by Nancy Shear Eugene Ormandy, the great conductor and my namesake, was once shopping for a suit jacket at Brooks Brothers. Trying one on, Ormandy began to move his arms about to see whether it was comfortable to wear while conducting. The salesman asked,
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Book in the spotlight: The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels In late 1945, a peasant getting ready for an honor killing unearthed a one-meter-long red earthenware jar near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi. Tempted by the thought that the jar might contain gold but also concerned that a jinn (a spirit) might be lurking
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Book in the spotlight: Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte The paperback edition of Curzio Malaparte’s Kaputt contains an afterword that really should have been the novel’s introduction. Its placement at the end of the text is deceptive but, from the publisher’s point of view, probably necessary – if it preceded the text, I suspect a lot less people
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Poem Translated: “A Memory” by Nikolay Zabolotsky Though Nikolay Zabolotsky was not yet fifty when he wrote “A Memory” in 1952, he was already a broken man. One of the founders of the Oberiu group, Zabolotsky had started as an avant-guard poet before moving in a more classical direction. Although no dissident, by the late
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Book in the spotlight: Superbloom by Nicholas Carr Nicholas Carr is the Cassandra of the digital age. In 2010 he published The Shallows, a contrarian bestseller that examined the deleterious effects of the Internet on our brains. In Superbloom, his latest book, Carr examines the deleterious effects of digital technology on our souls. The first
The Writings of Scriptor Adorans 