Wednesday’s Child: The Tinder Box
Every time I look at a newspaper, I feel like the soldier in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale of the tinder box.
Category: Andrei Navrozov
Wednesday’s Child: Base Notes
I am not writing this on pagan Lemuria or on what to the Catholics in Italy is Ognisanti, in other words, on All Saints’ Day, but apparently on what is now a Russian state holiday called Bailiffs’ Day.
Wednesday’s Child: Last but Not Least
The gentle reader would be rightly shocked if, after last week’s dramatic personal appeal in this space, his unruly correspondent changed tack and let fly with something about Russian shenanigans in West Africa.
Wednesday’s Child: The Glass Veranda
This week my wife is expected to give birth to our child. How can I not recall the moment in my beloved Pasternak’s Spektorsky, when the poet says….
Wednesday’s Child: Devil May Care and Does
As there is little hope that the gentle reader can recall a post of mine from four years ago, I will quote its closing paragraph. That week I had just returned from London from the funeral of a close friend where I came across an old acquaintance – novelist Sebastian Faulks, author of The Girl at the Lion d’Or and other light masterpieces – and this led me to reminisce about our last meeting many years earlier, at a Chinese restaurant of my choosing.
Wednesday’s Child: From an Old Notebook
The other day, sorting through some files, I came across a notebook of mine from exactly thirty years ago, a foppish little thing from Smythson of Bond Street, its robin’s-blue pages and black leather binding lending it the air of authority so becoming an unsuccessful writer in his prime.
Wednesday’s Child: A Reckless Fantasy
“Reckless fantasies of confrontation” was a favorite phrase of Soviet propaganda. Washington, went the argument, is a trigger-happy bully and all men of good will, meaning everybody on the Kremlin payroll, must unite in the face of such fantasies if holocaust is to be avoided.
Wednesday’s Child: The Echo’s Echo
Of all the fascinating and historically important details of last weekend’s elections to Russia’s “parliament,” by far the most remarkable is the result in Chechnya, where the Kremlin Gauleiter Ramzan Kadyrov received 99.7% of the vote.
Wednesday’s Child: White Rays Ascendant
Hammered as he is by the new Stalinism of “critical race theory” upon the anvil of the old Stalinism of “political correctness,” a denizen of the West may be tempted to lament that his days as a free man and a free thinker are over. He may even compare his position as an individual in society to that of a dissident under an authoritarian regime, if not Stalin’s Russia then at least its modern reincarnation, and conclude that the fat lady has sung and the opera’s over.
Wednesday’s Child: The Lion King
Even the dialectically materialist children’s books of my Soviet youth nurtured the idea of an “animal kingdom,” the realm where the lion was tsar. Presumably this autocrat ruled in consultation with his ministers, other imposing mammals like the elephant and the buffalo, and of course the principal temptation for a youthful intellect was to arrange the whole planetary zoo on the lines of the Table of Ranks introduced in 1722 by Peter the Great, whereby every citizen held a civilian rank corresponding to its military equivalent.
