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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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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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The Writings of Scriptor Adorans 