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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…
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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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The Writings of Scriptor Adorans 