Category: Andrei Navrozov

The identity of the Aragonese noble family associated with mafia style poisonings in Renaissance Italy – as well as with incest, larceny, and simony, among other lesser crimes – is incidental to the story here.  I can easily replace the name of Cesare Borgia with that of Claudius of Denmark, likewise known, at least to readers of Shakespeare, for murdering his brother: “My father’s brother, but no more like my father/Than I to Hercules.”  Prince Hamlet, in fact, was very much on my mind when, a couple of weeks ago, I watched Alexei Navalny’s investigation into his own murder. “I...

Like the word’s Italian variant, coprifuoco, “curfew”–which is now in effect in several European countries–comes from Old French cuevrefeu, “cover fire,” advice to citizens to extinguish fires at a certain hour of the evening.  My wife thinks it’s sweet. “It shows concern,” she says. “Just compare it to what we say in Russian.”  In Russian the equivalent is “commandant’s hour,” meaning do what you’re told or be brought before the commandant and get the regulation nine grams of lead in the back of your head.  Language gives nations away.

“Resolved, That the Earth is Flat” was in my youth the stalking horse of high school and university debating societies, probably because to people of college age the proposition sounded startling enough to make them tingle with anticipation of controversy.  Besides, since not one among them believed that the Earth was actually flat, deep down they were pleasantly certain that the outcome of the vote would in no way change their lives, and so on to law school they went.  They have debates of narrower scope these days, as many of them, upon finishing law school, clerking for important judges,...

The gentle reader may recall how once I waxed eloquent in lauding sloth, a vice that has done much to save Greek antiquities in Sicily. Vandalized in Greece by energetic locals, who routinely used the marble to build their rustic hovels, in Sicily these noble structures have survived largely intact for the simple reason that our peasants were too indolent to steal.  That, anyway, was my working theory. More broadly, sloth is one of the few things that stand between man and the picture of man portrayed by Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean.  Always scheming, always inventing, always eager to...

A haunting image was making the newspaper round the other week, which I am certain the gentle reader, if only out of a corner of his eye, has noted, perhaps even musing to himself that one of these days this photograph would get a mention in Wednesday’s Child.

I sometimes wonder how many of those reading me in this space realize what a privilege it is for a writer or journalist to set down on paper whatever comes into his head.  I recall, with a sadness not much tinged by sympathy, how my erstwhile colleagues in the profession would spend days searching for what their editors called a peg, which in practical terms meant that as March 8 rolled around the lot of them would be filing regurgitated biographies of Rosa Luxemburg.  The peg, in other words, amounts to censorship by social order.  Everything written to fill this order is, quite literally, off the peg, like a suit of cheap clothes.

As the gentle reader may remember from previous posts, my wife is a concert pianist who, over the last few years, has been busy bringing to light the time capsule of classical music which Shostakovich left buried in Azerbaijan, largely in the form of his beloved Kara Karaev.  Now Azerbaijan is at war with Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, while in Europe her concert engagements have been cancelled or postponed indefinitely due to the coronavirus.  So evenings Olga and I sit in the kitchen, poor and sober, debating what can be said in appeals to potential sponsors of the recording...

One such soup I decided to concoct last week, and may I warn the gentle reader not to try it at home.  I began preparing beef stock the day before, and on the following day the confounded recipe kept me in the kitchen from nine in the morning until the dinner guests arrived

I had known Pierre only slightly, and my wife still less, as the acquaintance largely predated her arrival in my life, but it was Pierre on whom the story she told at dinner pivoted.   As the guests had been challenged to recount the “oddest” of their experiences, I debuted with the bizarre personal episode posted here last week.  And Olga, likewise dredging her memory, came out with the tale of Pierre.