Author: Andrei Navrozov

I sometimes wonder how many of those reading me in this space realize what a privilege it is for a writer or journalist to set down on paper whatever comes into his head.  I recall, with a sadness not much tinged by sympathy, how my erstwhile colleagues in the profession would spend days searching for what their editors called a peg, which in practical terms meant that as March 8 rolled around the lot of them would be filing regurgitated biographies of Rosa Luxemburg.  The peg, in other words, amounts to censorship by social order.  Everything written to fill this order is, quite literally, off the peg, like a suit of cheap clothes.

As the gentle reader may remember from previous posts, my wife is a concert pianist who, over the last few years, has been busy bringing to light the time capsule of classical music which Shostakovich left buried in Azerbaijan, largely in the form of his beloved Kara Karaev.  Now Azerbaijan is at war with Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, while in Europe her concert engagements have been cancelled or postponed indefinitely due to the coronavirus.  So evenings Olga and I sit in the kitchen, poor and sober, debating what can be said in appeals to potential sponsors of the recording...

One such soup I decided to concoct last week, and may I warn the gentle reader not to try it at home.  I began preparing beef stock the day before, and on the following day the confounded recipe kept me in the kitchen from nine in the morning until the dinner guests arrived

I had known Pierre only slightly, and my wife still less, as the acquaintance largely predated her arrival in my life, but it was Pierre on whom the story she told at dinner pivoted.   As the guests had been challenged to recount the “oddest” of their experiences, I debuted with the bizarre personal episode posted here last week.  And Olga, likewise dredging her memory, came out with the tale of Pierre.

It’s a curious paradox that in the West, with its cultural affinity for individualism, weapons are usually anonymous. Who can name the designer of the F-22 or the inventor of the M-16?  The collectivist Russians, by contrast, name their arms after their authors, and even when a fighter plane built for Stalin happens to be the brainchild of an Armenian (Mikoyan) and a Jew (Gurevich), it still bears the name MiG.

The existence of Coke and Pepsi as two competing brands of the same fizz always put a powerful argument in the mouths of those Russians who would claim that America’s avowed attachment to pluralism is a facade.

Let me be honest with the gentle reader.  The idea of this post has been plagiarized by me from a site called EUvsDISINFO, where an article with the above title appeared a few days ago.  I do not often plagiarize, which says less about my morals as a scholar than about the state of modern journalism, but I found that article exceptionally interesting.

September must be allegory month, and fittingly one of the films now the talk of the Venice Film Festival is an offering from the Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky entitled “Dear Comrades.”  Its subject is the massacre of striking workers at Novocherkassk, a city near Rostov-on-Don, in 1962, and in fairness it ought to be said that a 2012 TV miniseries, entitled “Once Upon a Time in Rostov,” had done that subject ample justice, notwithstanding that it was made in the first year of what will enter history books as Putin’s Terror.  But Konchalovsky regards himself as an artist, and hence...