In Soviet times, “nationality” – meaning race – was, just like a subject’s given name and surname, a legally obligatory declaration. The famous “Fifth Line” on his internal passport was part of his destiny, perhaps the most important part, because once he was “Russian,” “Jew” or “Tatar,” his education, employment, and other material opportunities were set in stone. He was labeled for life.
“The past changes so quickly,” a Twitter pundit has observed, “you have no idea what will happen yesterday.” Not very original, as the gentle reader may remark, seeing the thought is basically taken from Orwell or maybe a writer of a still earlier era, like Karl Kraus, but a sinuous phrase none the less, something undeniably well noted and prettily put. Try trawling for a mot this juste in The Spectator these days, to say nothing of The New Yorker.
To my mind, today’s sociopolitical climate is a mélange of images from the NEP period, the short-lived “New Economic Policy” of the early 1920’s when Russia’s rulers attempted to combine totalitarian power with free enterprise rather the way China is now openly doing. What are some of those images?
The Lisbon calamity is estimated by modern historians to have taken 50,000 lives, almost exactly the number that perished in Turkey three weeks ago concomitantly with the collapse of an estimated 173,000 buildings.
“Don’t mention the war,” advised Basil in a famous episode of Fawlty Towers called “The Germans,” and I reckon the gentle reader appreciates that I’ve followed the hapless hotelier’s advice during the last few months of the ongoing catastrophe. Obliquely, however, that fast may be broken, rather the way a practicing Orthodox believer may sneak in a prawn or two during the Great Lent, which, incidentally, starts on Monday.
Were Plato alive today, and not in jail for extremism, I wonder what he and his cronies would be talking about in the boozer. Socrates, certainly, would by then have suffered pretty much the same fate as he did, and the conversation – transcribed for posterity by some sympathetic soul on the Fleming Foundation – would lack some of its former brilliance, but still its likely drift intrigues me.
My mother, may God rest her soul, was the only one in the family who had learned to drive. She once got a flat on the Major Deegan Expressway and recounted that motorists would whizz by the lady in evident distress without so much as a sidelong glance. The only ones who turned to look, she said, were black, and eventually one of them stopped to help her change the tire.
Last week I mentioned in passing the end-of-an-era arrest of Messina Denaro, the last of the great mafia latitanti who evaded capture for decades. Palermo is all abuzz like a disturbed vespiary, and even the usual morning fireworks – a perennial mystery to the visitor – have gone quiet on the news. Absurdly or not, the boom and crackle of the invisible pyrotechny marks the release of somebody of consequence from prison.
“How safe do people feel to walk alone on the streets at night?” Last week an acquaintance of ours, the irrepressible Olga Romanova, a recent exile from Russia, published a map thus headed in her Telegram blog.
I can’t find the film I once saw – I think it was with David Niven, playing lawn tennis and a jovial conman – but I remember that it reminded me of a similar scene in Thomas Mann’s last novel, Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man.
