Author: Andrei Navrozov

A physiognomic peculiarity of Viktor Zolotov, who until last week and for the past 13 years had been head of Russia’s presidential bodyguard, is that he is a Doppelgänger of the man he was charged with protecting from enemies foreign and domestic.  Dogs sometimes grow to look like their owners, and evidently this applies not only to old ladies’ poodles, but to guard dogs as well.  The German word I’m using, incidentally, meaning a body double, is not so much pretentiousness on my part as consciousness of an historical rhyme. If Zolotov is a Putin clone, what used to be...

The fable of the grasshopper and the ant, attributed to Aesop, is seminal to Western culture with its cult of human industry.  Where a Russian or an Indian finds room and reason for relying on God or fate, an Englishman or a Frenchman hearkens to the moral of the fable, which miscasts fatalism as indolence and insouciance as folly.  Dostoevsky’s Karamazov brothers, in consequence, step aside in this culture to make room for TV’s Kardashian sisters, as even the most intimate details of one’s private life’s take on the configurations of ardent toil. The English language is largely blind to...

I signed off last week’s post with the observation that rehabilitation – especially the posthumous kind – is a bribe that legality slips to justice, and since then I’ve read a little of the story of St. Joan of Arc, illustrating my point rather neatly.  It may be remembered that, a quarter of a century after they had burned her at the stake in the marketplace at Rouen, the woman in question was exonerated on appeal by the Inquisitor General.  A quarter of a century, it seems – in other words, a generation – is how long it usually takes,...

Last week Alfredo, my closest friend here in Sicily, was arrested on charges of mafia association.  Manlio, a friend Alfredo and I have in common, had suffered exactly the same fate some twenty years ago; after a year in jail awaiting trial, and many another of a ruined life, he was in the end acquitted of all charges imputed to him; by then, however, this former mayor of Palermo was a broken man.  Now it’s Alfredo’s turn to serve as a film extra in a political production known as the war against the mafia. When Mussolini wanted to wipe out...

  My son is in his last year at Oxford – drinking, mostly, as far as I understand from his sporadic communications–and so, when I see a news story with the university’s name in it, I take note.  There was one just the other day. “Serial Killer Uses European Human Rights Law to Sue for Compensation Because Prison Makes her Tearful and Upset.”  Oh no, sorry, wrong headline. The right one was no less absurd, and the gist of it was that a bunch of students… We pretty much know who they are, because for the last fifty years, in...

I loathe photography on principle, along with all the other abominations of the Edwardian era which presage the ethical phantasmagoria of our times – notably women in trousers and a music-hall view of everything east of Brighton – yet there are moments when I wish we could publish photographs here.  With today’s post, I would have the gentle reader scrutinizing a snapshot of a young lady by the name of Valeria Rytvina.  Blond, not bad looking, she’s the very picture of what most people would call a normal girl. Last year, a woman in Yekaterinburg – a city in the...

  I have not really been following the fruit salad of the American presidential election, as the only apparently human being among the Republican candidates might have bumbled, and yesterday’s Super Tuesday is no exception. So I write this through a fog of wilful ignorance, its mists made all the more impenetrable by the Atlantic’s breadth.  At times, however, such scanty impressions, gleaned almost against one’s will, have some salubrious value, as not buying a used car simply because one had taken a dislike to the peonies on the salesman’s shirt can have a salutary effect on one’s wallet. Carson,...

“If somebody were to prove to me once and for all that Christ is not Truth, and if indeed it was so that Truth lay outside Christ,” Dostoevsky famously proclaimed, “I would still choose Christ over Truth.”  Some years after the Russian writer had sounded this chord in one of his novels, Vasily Rozanov, in some ways his only spiritual heir, came up with his own version of the credo. Rozanov was a thinker who combined the flamboyance of Oscar Wilde with the originality of Friedrich Nietzsche and the modesty of Marcus Aurelius, and I have always marvelled at the...

“Centuries after Great Schism”–well, some ten of them, to be more precise–“Pope and Patriarch are to Meet.”  So a headline in the Financial Times.  It makes me wonder if, in their editors’ and reporters’ view, all news with only a remote historical precedent is ipso facto grounds for optimism.  Now, seeing as God isn’t really these people’s beat, let’s poke around for an example closer to their hearts to illustrate my misgivings.  What about “Corporate Tax in France without Parallel at 99%”?  Or “Germany: Banks Nationalized Overnight”?  Or “All Private Property Abolished in Britain”? “Ah,” I may be told, “but...