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Poem translated: “Silentium!” by Fyodor Tyutchev Fyodor Tyutchev was one of the grandees of 19th-century Russian poetry. He was such a great poet that some of his poems spawned stand-alone aphorisms. Arguably the most famous one concerns the mind’s inability to make sense of Russia (umom Rossiyu ne ponyat’). Another holds that every thought becomes
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Book Reviewed: The Ottomans by Marc David Baer Good history books relate past events. Bad history books reinterpret them with an eye on the present context. Charting the story of the Ottoman Empire from its founding by Osman I to the empire’s demise in the early 20th century, Marc David Baer’s The Ottomans would be
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Poem translated: “The Devil’s Voice” by Konstantin Balmont Man is a rebellious creature. This is the meaning of the metaphor of original sin. The transgression in the Garden of Eden was man’s first revolutionary act; in scope and consequence, it was also his greatest and most daring. He’s been at it ever since. “Bogoborchestvo,” the
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Remembering the great pianist Maria Yudina There are comparatively few biographies of great pianists — with reason, I always thought. Pianists didn’t seem to be especially interesting to read about, even great ones. I assumed it was because they were, after all, only performers, interpreters of other people’s work. Lacking the sweeping vision of creators, they could
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Book Reviewed: The Birth of Biopolitics by Michel Foucault Commenting on his own manner of expressing thoughts, Michel Foucault likened himself to crayfish. As in, he moved sideways. Actually, he was more like an eel — slippery and elusive. Thus, in The Birth of Biopolitics, a collection of lectures delivered at the Collège de France in 1979,
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Book Reviewed: The Twilight of Europe by Grigory Landau (originally published in May 2024) A Nobel Prize-winning poet once said there was no such thing as an unrecognized genius. Aside from the obvious provability problem — by definition, an unrecognized genius never comes to anyone’s attention, or else the genius is not unrecognized — the story of
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Book reviewed: The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa (originally published in April 2024) If you know next to nothing about Fernando Pessoa, most of the disquiet that you might experience with The Book of Disquiet will come from deciding what version of the text you should read. The English section at Lisbon’s Livraria Bertrand, the world’s oldest bookstore,
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On a forgotten thinker and Putin’s useful idiots (originally published in March 2024) In the fall of 1922, a steamer left Bolshevik Russia for Germany. One of several so-called “Philosophers’ Ships,” it carried some of the greatest Russian minds of their time, men who had been deemed politically unreliable by Soviet authorities and kicked out
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Book Reviewed: The Spanish Inquisition by Henry Kamen (originally published in Jan 2024) There is a movie I recall seeing years ago. It is your typical Hollywood cookie-cutter production as far as movies go, but the last scene is memorable. The leader of a team of assassins (played by Samuel Jackson, if I am not mistaken) is
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Poem translated: “A Riddle” by Pyotr Vyazemsky (originally published in Jan 2024) Alexander Pushkin is the Mozart of Russian poetry. A Mozart is a blessing for posterity, but not so much for the other talent in the room, which tends to get crowded out. In Russia’s Golden Age of Poetry, there was a lot of
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The Writings of Scriptor Adorans 