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On the Russian thinker and writer Vasily Rozanov (originally published in Nov 2023) “There are people born ‘well made’ for the world and others who are not born ‘well made,’ ” wrote Vasily Rozanov in Fallen Leaves, promptly adding he belonged to the second category. He was not wrong. Touchy, venomous, and conflicted, Rozanov (1856–1919) certainly
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Book reviewed: From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun (originally published in August 2023) Writing a history of the last half a millennia of Western civilization is a daunting task, particularly if you only have 800 pages in which to do it. Jacques Barzun (1907–2012) seems to have pulled it off. He was certainly the right man
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Book reviewed: More Die of Heartbreak by Saul Bellow (originally published in July 2023) One of Saul Bellow’s less well-known works, More Die of Heartbreak is the story of a bromance between Kenneth Trachtenberg, a Russian studies scholar and narrator of the novel, and his uncle Benn Crader, a renowned botanist. Kenneth, who grew up in the sophisticated Parisian
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Book reviewed: Peter Manso’s Mailer: His Life and Times (originally published in June 2023) I’d read a bit of fiction by Norman Mailer, as well as his essays and interviews, and so I bought Peter Manso’s Mailer: His Life and Times at a local bookstore thinking it would be an entertaining companion on a long-haul flight. I thought
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Poem translated: “An Execution” by Vladimir Nabokov (originally published in May 2023) Vladimir Nabokov is primarily known as a brilliant writer of fiction, but he also wrote some damn fine poems. In fact, someone (I can’t remember who — Joseph Brodsky?) said that Nabokov was a poet manqué who, failing to make his mark as
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Book reviewed: Isaiah Berlin: A Life by Michael Ignatieff (originally published in April 2023) I’d wanted to read Isaiah Berlin: A Life, Michael Ignatieff’s biography of the eminent British thinker, for quite a while. I’d greatly enjoyed Berlin’s essays (Russian Thinkers, an anthology of writings on Russian 19th-century thought, is a personal favorite), and I also knew Berlin had
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Book reviewed: Russia and Europe by Nikolai Danilevsky (originally published in March 2023) In the 1990s, Samuel Huntington published his famous The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, an expanded version of an article he’d originally penned for Foreign Affairs. The book was a necessary corrective to the exuberantly optimistic view that had set in after
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Book reviewed: In the Shadow of Tomorrow by Johan Huizinga (originally published in March 2023) “We are living in a demented world.” Thus opens In the Shadow of Tomorrow: A Diagnosis of the Modern Distemper, a study of the crisis of the modern world. The book was published in 1936, and its author, the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga,
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Poem translated and analyzed: “God” by Gavriil Derzhavin (originally published in Jan 2023) Highlighting the plight of translators across all genres, an old-fashioned and typically Gallic aphorism compares the fruits of their labor to women: when they are beautiful, they are not faithful, and when they are faithful, they are not beautiful. The challenges translators
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Brief reflections on The Diary of a Writer by Fyodor Dostoevsky (originally published in Dec 2022) Having just finished The Diary of a Writer, all 1,000+ pages of it, I am feeling a bit like a bloated boa constrictor trying to digest its last meal. Published irregularly as a literary journal between 1873 and 1881 (the last issue
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The Writings of Scriptor Adorans 