Category: Access

Our precious Mount Etna, which happens to be the tallest volcano in Europe, has been exploding, with streams of molten lava descending into the Valle del Bove from elevations of some three kilometers at the crater’s rim.  A BBC team of reporters nearly didn’t make it down, which showed them that nature could be as violent as the teenage drug lords and tattooed single mothers they had been used to interviewing in their line of duty. ‘“a Muntagna,” the locals call it in dialect – the Mountain with a capital M – as attested by a man named Gaetano Perricone,...

Persons unfamiliar with Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume cycle of novels, A Dance to the Music of Time, ought to bear in mind that, socially, cocaine may well be a less problematic alternative. Certainly the book is more addictive, but the real trouble is that it makes one eschew all human contact for the duration.  I remember sinking into it some ten years ago.  For three weeks I did not open the shutters or answer the telephone, waking up every morning with the same terrifying thought that one day it would end. Spanning roughly half of the twentieth century, Powell’s novel revolves...

Was that biography ever going to work?  I honestly don’t know.  Even if I had been writing the book not in a foreign tongue but in my own, and not for foreign readers but for those familiar with my subject since childhood, even then, insofar as it ran contrary to the Pasternak myth, an explanation of feeling might run into outraged silence.  The explanation I actually attempted, in these strange circumstances, was still more improbable. To focus on a single episode of Russian culture, its most blinding moment, and to develop it against the fuzzy background of certain historical events...

Watching what the Guardian last week rather wittily dubbed the president’s anti-press conference, I reflected on the extent to which the survival of our culture depends on syntax.  As I have a stepmother tongue, English, in addition to my mother tongue, I am constantly reminded of ways in which much less syntactically evolved Russian allows the speaker or writer to obscure his meaning – sometimes intentionally, when he is lying, sometimes despite himself, when he is telling the truth. To be sure, Russian has strengths that English does not possess – a wealth of inflections, for instance, keeps our rhyming...