Author: Andrei Navrozov

The renowned organist Marianna Vysotskaya has been staying with us while my wife, who is a friend of hers, is away in Moscow, preparing for a recital at the Rachmaninov Hall of the Conservatory.  Marianna is here in Sicily to play three concerts, one at San Pietro in Trapani, one at the Palermo Cathedral, and one next Sunday in Messina. The sailing has not been smooth, as everyone in the district, on seeing me in the company of an unknown woman, feels duty bound to mention my wife in a preternaturally loud voice.  “When is Olga back?” thunders Signor Baldo...

Well, Brexit did happen in the end, contrary to my son’s prediction of a Thirty Years’ War, and we toasted the news with vodka.  I spent the following week recovering and reading up on the history of that magic potion, learning much about it I had not known.  No Russian I’ve ever met, for instance, would tell you that the word itself, “vodka,” is scarcely more than a hundred years old.  Instead, for many centuries, and well into the nineteenth, the term “bread wine,” or simply “wine,” was generally used to describe forty-proof alcohol made from grain. Strangely enough, when...

Winter has been even milder than usual here, and I would be happy to hail global warming were it not for the inconvenient fact that over the last 40 years average world surface temperatures have not changed, while during the 40 years before that, from 1946 to 1975, they actually fell, by one-tenth of one degree Centigrade to be precise. 

The plot of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, or the Peer and the Peri turns on a clause in the fairy constitution which states that “any fairy shall die who doth marry a mortal.”  At the end of the second and final act of this masterpiece of English sarcasm, however, the Lord Chancellor, who has declared himself an old hand at all matters legislatorial, proposes a small change that will allow members of the House of Lords to intermarry with fairies.  This the constitutional guardian achieves by changing the word “doth” to the word “don’t,” so the problematic clause now says...

I recalled the episode, and the man, while perusing the British papers overflowing with the Royal Family scandal of the moment.  Briefly, this centers on the person of the American mulatta C-list actress who has married the younger son of Prince Charles and is now blackmailing the Queen into releasing her and her husband from Royal duties

As it is now Russian Christmas, let us be jolly. Besides, I have so fatigued the gentle reader of late with my special brand of gloom and doom, even a single ray of sunshine may restore him to the belief that Wednesday’s Child is not congenitally insensible to the lighter side of life.

If I’m sober enough to write this on New Year’s Eve, my gentle reader will surely have sobered up by New Year’s Day, and will consequently pardon me for staying on the Kremlinology hobbyhorse all through the holidays.

The church bells of Italy, l’Italia dei campanili, are ringing in Christmas, and though my own Christmas is two weeks on and the Orthodox bells ring so differently, I heartily wish that the melodious concatenation reaches the gentle reader.

Put simply, over the last twenty years the story of civil liberties in Russia has run in parallel with Solomon Grundy’s.  That arrest there has now become virtually synonymous with prosecution, and prosecution with conviction, is evidence stark enough for any man of good will, but periodically a legal case comes to light for which the starkness is merely a charming background. This week it is the case of one Egor Zhukov, a 21-year-old university student who was arrested in July during the street demonstrations in Moscow.  As evidence the judge was shown a police videotape of a young man...