Category: Wednesday’s Child

My childhood reading in Russia was divided between ordinary printed books–that is to say, rectangular objects recognizable by their covers and spines–and loose paper sheaves, underground artifacts that friends of friends of friends had been disseminating and passing to friends of friends until a copy reached one friend or another of my father’s. The principal engine for the dissemination of “samizdat,” as those sheaves were called, was the typewriter, loaded with as many as six carbons, and the avowed aim of the disseminators was the collapse of the existing regime. The disseminators of those forbidden typescripts, who were known as...

The self-indulgent rooster, crowing solely for his own biological pleasure, is seen by some as nature’s alarm clock and an enduring symbol of the countryside.  Others prefer it as coq-au-vin. Some would say that the critical reaction to Second Nature was no more than I deserved.  I had already made a nuisance of myself, what with those convoluted explanations of feeling and coquettish invocations of the Russian soul, so by wringing my neck the reviewers were merely performing a socially useful task.  My point is that whatever critical opprobrium I may deserve for all that self-indulgence, the genuinely interested reader...

Nobody is talking about Trump in London, I’m happy to say.  From a geopolitical perspective – provided you believe, as I do, that geopolitics is stark reality by a fancy name – this is naïve and foolish and a bit like hiding your head in the sand.  From a human perspective, however, it is immensely satisfying.  I would happily fly back to England just to escape the interminable tête-à-tête with the newsfeeds on my computer screen, where Trump has now overtaken the Kardashians as statesman and thinker. I stayed with my best friend there, the one who is getting divorced. ...

A provincial painter of eclectic pictures, of the sort immortalised by Saki under the title “Dying Hyenas in Trafalgar Square,” wrote in to a Sunday newspaper recently to announce his resignation from the world of art.  There was no critical milieu in Britain, he lamented, sensitive enough to save him from oblivion.  “No matter what I paint, or how good or bad my works are,” he wrote in his letter, “no newspaper, magazine or gallery has shown the slightest interest.” “I am not saying that I am right and they are wrong,” the gentle creature from Stonebroom, near Alfreton, Derbyshire,...

An absurdly generous friend put us up in a hotel new to the city, The Peninsula, where a bottle of mineral water from room service would set you back $28.  Back in Palermo, that would buy me a whole roast lamb – dinner for eight to ten guests, or a wild sea bass of mammoth proportions. One of the functions I was to attend in Paris was a meeting of expat Republicans – “Republicans” as in the GOP, not in the European sense of cowardly regicides – and, when I got there, the contrast could not have been more striking. ...

Oh, how it made me wish that our late friend Curtis Cate were still here, living in the Rue des Saints-Pères and gesticulating awkwardly when lamenting this or that Soviet ploy.  I went into a tobacconist’s under the windows of his old apartment and asked the lady at the counter if she remembered Monsieur Cate, the American writer.  She said she did, supplying me with a sour smile, a packet of unfiltered Gitanes, and an English newspaper. The news was that Putin had cancelled his visit to Paris, where the new Russian “Spiritual and Cultural Center” – an almost unimaginably...

Attentive readers may recall my post back in April, “Just Don’t Call it Praetorian,” in which I compared the newly formed National Guard, Russia’s president’s 350,000-strong personal army, to Himmler’s Schutzstaffel (SS) in Nazi Germany.  One reason for its creation, I argued, was to counterbalance the army of Ramzan Kadyrov’s Kremlin loyalists, historically a clone of Röhm’s Sturmabteilung (SA). Now another reason has come to the fore, and it deserves a separate post – especially in view of the fact that I first broached the subject with an article in the June 2011 issue of a magazine that the founder...