One aspect of the present invasion of Ukraine, and of the causes that precipitated it, has gone virtually unremarked. Yet recent revelations consequent to the ongoing mass arrests in the highest echelons of the Russian military – an echo of Stalin’s purge of the Red Army on the eve of World War II – are shedding light on a murky chapter in the annals of this century’s history.
Van Houten, the Dutch chocolatier founded some two hundred years ago, is still in business today selling its brand of cocoa, but few remember the public-relations ploy that made it famous. Mayakovsky, in a poem written in 1914, recalls a man condemned to death by hanging who had been paid by the company to shout “Drink Van Houten’s cocoa!” from the scaffold as the sentence was being carried out.
Before I say anything else about last week’s sojourn, I must mention the eatery where we dined on Wednesday. As it’s in Milan, not Palermo, where I keep such things under wraps, I make public its name and declare it one of the ten best in a lifetime of anxiously restrained gluttony.
Whoever did not fantasize about making Plato’s Symposium or Phaedrus into a feature film had probably had a deprived childhood. I certainly did, and one particular detail sticks in my mind, namely, that I gave the Russian actor playing Socrates a slight stutter.
Jean Baudrillard, who died some twenty years ago, was a French intellectual, and this, perhaps, is all the gentle reader wants to know. But in fact, the species Baudrillard represents is not indigenous to voluble France.
When asked to name the writer who best described daily life in the United States, my father invariably answered, “Chekhov.”
Strictly speaking, I should’ve stayed home last Saturday, passing time in meditation and prayer, but then how would we have celebrated on Sunday?
I cannot think of any English diminutives for Paul, but one of the Russian ones is Pavlik, functionally equivalent to Paolino in Italy. Saying “Paolino” to an Italian, however, will draw a blank, and it is vain to expect a response along the lines of “Ah, yes, of course, Fra Paolino da Pistoia, Dominican friar and Renaissance painter!” or something yet more recherché. But to any Russian alive today, “Pavlik” can only ever refer to one historical personage.
This week history buffs mark the birthdays of two men who made the twentieth century what it was. Lenin and Hitler were born within days of one another, under the sign of Taurus in the cruelest month of April. The more effete among us, however, mark the birth of Immanuel Kant, 300 years ago as of the day before yesterday, same day as Hitler’s.
“I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars,” George Best famously said. “The rest I just squandered.” There are men in the world who, when young, have proudly lived by this quip, only to undergo a kind of Pauline conversion in middle age, binning the toys of protracted childhood and at length settling down to the life of a Roman emperor in exile.
