Category: Feature

“Well, where is the getting down to the nitty-gritty then, eh?  The bedroom stuff you promised us? ” What I want the reader to glean from the preceding, anticipating some of my yet stranger claims, is that the Pasternak family had been split from the beginning.  The female line, issuing from the mother, produced Boris and Josephine.  Alexander and Lydia took after the father. When it comes to genetic roulette, a special deity protects the integrity of the big loser.  Rosalia gambled away music, but ended up with a devoted husband.  Boris staked his all on being like everyone else,...

  Lev Navrozov, my father, died last night.  The Orthodox priest who came to the hospice to administer the last rites could not do so, as one must repent one’s sins and the dying man was unconscious, but truth to tell, my father had no sins to confess.  He had lived his whole life in a kind of autistic cell of the mind, as close to monastic confinement as the profane world has to offer to the congenital intellectual whose brain is, or ought to be, his sole active organ. There was a Russian science fiction novel of the 1920’s...

I noted with interest last week that a popular pornographic site reported a 102% increase in searches relating to practices in which the US president-elect is alleged to have engaged while a visitor in Moscow. To my mind, the hoary vulgarity implicit in the stated aim of the man’s visit – namely, the staging of a “beauty pageant” – trumps any perversions that he may or may not have explicitly indulged, but I reckon not many of those who use the pornographic site in question will agree with me. It is as though I am conducting a dialogue at cross...

A month or so ago, at the end of November, in a post entitled “An Awl in Sackcloth” I mentioned Vladimir Medinsky, who is Russia’s current minister of culture.  I have since been reading up on the man, and the things I’ve learned are literally boggling my mind, weakened as it is by holiday overindulgence.  I hope I may be permitted, in the scope of a longish post, to broaden the hapless minister’s appeal by boggling yours. Some of the scandals in which Medinsky has been embroiled are of scant concern to me personally, though the Russian internet – as...

With the Pasternak centenary in 1990 came several full-length biographies of the poet, and a discussion of their merits in the literary pages.  Reviewing Christopher Barnes’s Pasternak, Peter Levi, who has no Russian, startled readers of the Independent with the theory that “Doctor Zhivago was his masterpiece, but only a poet could have written it.”  “He has some Russian,” lied Peter France, who does not have enough Russian to know he was lying, reviewing Levi’s Pasternak in The Scotsman. Reviewing Levi’s Pasternak in the Observer, Anthony Burgess, who had expended what Russian he had ever had on A Clockwork Orange,...