Category: Access

  Lev Navrozov, my father, died last night.  The Orthodox priest who came to the hospice to administer the last rites could not do so, as one must repent one’s sins and the dying man was unconscious, but truth to tell, my father had no sins to confess.  He had lived his whole life in a kind of autistic cell of the mind, as close to monastic confinement as the profane world has to offer to the congenital intellectual whose brain is, or ought to be, his sole active organ. There was a Russian science fiction novel of the 1920’s...

I noted with interest last week that a popular pornographic site reported a 102% increase in searches relating to practices in which the US president-elect is alleged to have engaged while a visitor in Moscow. To my mind, the hoary vulgarity implicit in the stated aim of the man’s visit – namely, the staging of a “beauty pageant” – trumps any perversions that he may or may not have explicitly indulged, but I reckon not many of those who use the pornographic site in question will agree with me. It is as though I am conducting a dialogue at cross...

A month or so ago, at the end of November, in a post entitled “An Awl in Sackcloth” I mentioned Vladimir Medinsky, who is Russia’s current minister of culture.  I have since been reading up on the man, and the things I’ve learned are literally boggling my mind, weakened as it is by holiday overindulgence.  I hope I may be permitted, in the scope of a longish post, to broaden the hapless minister’s appeal by boggling yours. Some of the scandals in which Medinsky has been embroiled are of scant concern to me personally, though the Russian internet – as...