By Eugene Ehren
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Book in the spotlight: Notes of a Dead Man by Mikhail Bulgakov In March of 1936, the hilariously named Soviet newspaper Pravda (Russian for “truth”) published a scathing review of Mikhail Bulgakov’s play Molière. The review attacked the work for its supposedly flawed historicism and called into question its ideological soundness. Today the hit piece
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Book in the spotlight: The Erl-King by Michel Tournier In Goethe’s poem “The Erl-King,” a father and his son are traveling through a forest on horseback. The little boy takes fright, and when the father asks him what’s wrong, the boy says the Erl-King, a malevolent elf who preys on children in the woods, is
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Book in the spotlight: All the World’s Mornings by Pascal Quignard Sainte Colombe is a virtuosic but reclusive violist in the France of Louis XIV. The widowed man lives with his two daughters, Madeleine and Toinette, who dote on the cranky maestro and sometimes perform alongside him as part of a homegrown trio for the
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Book in the spotlight: The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov by Andrea Pitzer Vladimir Nabokov once told an interviewer that books unable to meet his standards of excellence were shut with a bang and banished from his bed. The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov by Andrea Pitzer would have been one of those books, a
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Book in the spotlight: The Renaissance in Italy by Jacob Burckhardt Originally published in 1860, The Renaissance in Italy is Jacob Burckhardt’s 550-page analysis of what the Renaissance man saw when he gazed at the sky. It is not a linear history of the Renaissance, and is light on the when’s, where’s, and what’s of
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Book in the spotlight: Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs A picture is worth a thousand words; two pictures can be worth an entire history book. For an example of what I have in mind, compare a couple of extant photos of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. One of them, taken in 1923, shows a young intellectual gazing
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Book reviewed: Lost Genius by Kevin Bazzana He was said to be a new Liszt. Music lovers flocked to his concerts. Critics wrote gushing reviews. Aristocrats and assorted royalty opened the doors of their salons to hear him play. Puccini and Lehár sang his praises. A psychologist made him the subject of a book. He
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Essay reviewed: “Flight from Byzantium” by Joseph Brodsky Joseph Brodsky disdained prose, considering it an inferior genre, and he also disdained the concept of space, preferring the abstract idea of time. So it is doubly ironic that, by the time the Russo-American poet and Nobel laureate died in 1996, he had completed two essay anthologies,
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Classics revisited: The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal Stendhal’s reputation rests on two novels: The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. It is the second one that I recently reread, in the original, to see whether it was as perennially fresh as a great classic ought to be. The Charterhouse of Parma
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Book review: Extinction by Thomas Bernhard In 1967 the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) was awarded a prize from a German institution. He later wrote a short essay about the experience. The essay is vintage Bernhard, and here is how it begins: “In the summer of nineteen sixty-seven I spent three months in the Lung
The Writings of Scriptor Adorans 