Category: Andrei Navrozov

Our irreproachably highbrow editor has confessed in a recent post to “have read thousands of mystery novels without a single blush,” and I’ve taken that as a sign, nay, as a command to confess my own flirtations with the lowbrow.  Chief among these, given that age and marital status no longer permit me to wake up in haystacks with strangers and hangovers, is a fascination with a particular kind of Russian television series that may be described as a shoot-‘em-up soap opera.  The main purveyor of these, since the end of the 1990’s, is a channel called NTV, founded in...

“Giorgio Armani: provocative outfits are a kind of rape,” was yesterday the banner headline in a British newspaper.  Another newspaper went with current events instead of applied philosophy: “Rapist Harvey Weinstein is rushed to hospital in the ambulance that was transferring him from court to prison after shouting ‘I’m innocent’ as he was convicted.” Armani has never made a piece of women’s clothing that is even remotely feminine, so his ploy to exploit the me-too trend for personal gain is just good business practice.  The other headline is more poignant.  It has the characteristic breathlessness that accompanies reports of popular...

The renowned organist Marianna Vysotskaya has been staying with us while my wife, who is a friend of hers, is away in Moscow, preparing for a recital at the Rachmaninov Hall of the Conservatory.  Marianna is here in Sicily to play three concerts, one at San Pietro in Trapani, one at the Palermo Cathedral, and one next Sunday in Messina. The sailing has not been smooth, as everyone in the district, on seeing me in the company of an unknown woman, feels duty bound to mention my wife in a preternaturally loud voice.  “When is Olga back?” thunders Signor Baldo...

Well, Brexit did happen in the end, contrary to my son’s prediction of a Thirty Years’ War, and we toasted the news with vodka.  I spent the following week recovering and reading up on the history of that magic potion, learning much about it I had not known.  No Russian I’ve ever met, for instance, would tell you that the word itself, “vodka,” is scarcely more than a hundred years old.  Instead, for many centuries, and well into the nineteenth, the term “bread wine,” or simply “wine,” was generally used to describe forty-proof alcohol made from grain. Strangely enough, when...

Winter has been even milder than usual here, and I would be happy to hail global warming were it not for the inconvenient fact that over the last 40 years average world surface temperatures have not changed, while during the 40 years before that, from 1946 to 1975, they actually fell, by one-tenth of one degree Centigrade to be precise. 

The plot of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, or the Peer and the Peri turns on a clause in the fairy constitution which states that “any fairy shall die who doth marry a mortal.”  At the end of the second and final act of this masterpiece of English sarcasm, however, the Lord Chancellor, who has declared himself an old hand at all matters legislatorial, proposes a small change that will allow members of the House of Lords to intermarry with fairies.  This the constitutional guardian achieves by changing the word “doth” to the word “don’t,” so the problematic clause now says...

I recalled the episode, and the man, while perusing the British papers overflowing with the Royal Family scandal of the moment.  Briefly, this centers on the person of the American mulatta C-list actress who has married the younger son of Prince Charles and is now blackmailing the Queen into releasing her and her husband from Royal duties

As it is now Russian Christmas, let us be jolly. Besides, I have so fatigued the gentle reader of late with my special brand of gloom and doom, even a single ray of sunshine may restore him to the belief that Wednesday’s Child is not congenitally insensible to the lighter side of life.

If I’m sober enough to write this on New Year’s Eve, my gentle reader will surely have sobered up by New Year’s Day, and will consequently pardon me for staying on the Kremlinology hobbyhorse all through the holidays.