Reviews and News:
The influence of Roger Scruton: "The academy has trouble finding a place for someone who wishes to think and speak authoritatively about the human world and its relationship to the whole of things. It is not surprising then that Scruton left the academic world in 1993 (after twenty years at London's Birkbeck College and a stint at Boston University) to become a full-time writer and 'man of letters' (his preferred self-description)."
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Hemingway and Dos Passos's friendship and falling out.
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The rise of Athens: How "a motley village of pirates developed the world's first democracy and how they kept the Spartans and Persians at bay for almost two hundred years, only to fall back into darkness."
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How did the apple become the forbidden fruit in Genesis? A Latin pun.
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Jack Kerouac's America and the novelist's late disdain for the anti-establishment: "Before On the Road's protagonists, Sal and Dean, ever balled the jack across miles of open blacktop, moving from one brief habitation to the next, America was in the throes of temporary relocations, out-and-out migrations, and demographic shifts of an unprecedented scale. Some 15 million Americans were in uniform and away from home during the war, and Life reported that an estimated 75 percent of them did not intend to return to their hometowns. Nearly as many relocated owing to war-related industry, largely to be near shipyards and aircraft plants along the coasts and the Gulf Shore or near the veritable arsenal that emerged in and around Detroit. The sociologist Francis E. Merrill noted in 1948 that more than 27.5 million Americans "experienced at least one wartime change of residence that removed them from one set of social influences and often failed to substitute similar influences." Roughly 20 percent of the population, in other words, was socially unmoored by the war."
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The life and work of Virginia Woolf's sister: "The Bloomsbury painter Vanessa Bell, née Stephen, lived most of her life (1879–1961) in the chilly, concealing shade of her younger sister, Virginia Woolf—the last twenty years following Virginia's suicide in 1941. Though the attention paid to the Bloomsbury Group seems to be waning on both sides of the Atlantic, there is currently a surge of interest in Bell. Priya Parmar's novel Vanessa and Her Sister artfully sheds new light on Bell, who is also part of an imaginative group exhibition, 'Sussex Modernism: Retreat and Rebellion,' at Two Temple Place in London (William Waldorf Astor's townhouse, now an exhibition venue)...Posterity has judged Virginia the greater artist, but in Parmar's fictionalized account, Vanessa is the nobler, more sympathetic of the Bloomsbury Group's founding sisters. Was Bell a good painter?"
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Essay of the Day:
In The New Criterion, Gary Saul Morson revisits the publication and influence of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago:
"Boris Pasternak, whose novel Doctor Zhivago occasioned the Soviet Union's greatest cultural defeat just sixty years ago, utterly despised the groupthink encouraged by the regime and embraced by so many intellectuals. At a meeting of Soviet writers, Pasternak once bravely rejected the official requirement that novelists and poets take orders like so many factory engineers. When the other writers protested indignantly, Pasternak replied: 'Don't yell at me. Or if you must yell, at least do not do so in unison.' In the USSR, everything was, or was supposed to be, in unison.
"What was it about this novel that so angered Soviet authorities? If one judges the book from David Lean's 1964 film Doctor Zhivago—usually listed as one of the top ten grossing movies of all time—it would seem harmless enough. Against the background of Russian chaos from 1903 to 1929, a Russian doctor, who is also a poet, grows up, learns his trade, marries, falls in love with another woman, finds himself alone, and dies of a heart attack on a streetcar. Since Lean strives for epic length, stretching scenes instead of cutting them, there's lots of time for beautiful pictures of the Russian (actually Spanish and Finnish) countryside, displays of tsarist brutality alongside Bolshevik zeal, and misspelled Russian placards. To be sure, the novel, however romantic, cannot rival the film's schmaltz and vapid pretentiousness, but it hardly reads like the dissident fiction to come. As Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's nephew once remarked, this was not a book likely to spark a counter-revolution. Take out four hundred words, he opined, and everything explicitly anti-Bolshevik would be gone. (I rely on a fine and readable narrative: Peter Finn and Petra Couvée, The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, The CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book.)
"Far from the epic Lean imagined, the novel reads more like a sequence of brief lyric poems, the form in which Pasternak and his hero Zhivago both specialized. When Pasternak began Doctor Zhivago in 1945, he was already a world-famous poet who would be nominated for the Nobel Prize the following year. No one would have guessed that he regarded his poems as mere preparatory sketches for a prose narrative showing what great art is all about, solving the riddle of life and death. More than a creation, Doctor Zhivago was for its author 'my alter ego, in which with almost physical concreteness certain of my spiritual qualities and part of my nervous structure have been implanted.'
"When Pasternak finished the book in 1955, he managed to publish a few excerpts from its last chapter, which contains its hero's poems. Zhivago, too, thought of his verse as leading to 'a book about life which would contain, like buried explosives, the most striking things he had so far seen and thought about. . . . He was like a painter who was always making sketches for a big canvas he had in mind.' Zhivago never wrote that novel, and Pasternak was never allowed by the Soviets to publish anything but these few poems. They meant to keep the explosive prose buried.
"But when Sergio D'Angelo, an Italian Communist in Moscow, visited Pasternak with an offer to have the novel published in Italy, Pasternak seized the opportunity. Within a few years, several Russian dissident writers, including the Nobel Prize winners Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky, followed his example. No matter the cost, poets must speak. When Pasternak gave readings, audiences would shout out 'Sixty-six!,' by which they meant his translation of Shakespeare's sixty-sixth sonnet with its reference to 'art made tongue-tied by authority.' They also had in mind his rather free 'translation' of Hamlet's soliloquy, in which 'Who would bear the whips and scorns of time' became 'Who would bear the phony greatness of the rulers, the ignorance of the bigwigs, the common hypocrisy, the impossibility to express oneself, the unrequited love and illusoriness of merits in the eyes of mediocrities?' The quiet dreamer Pasternak became the model of Russian resistance.
"D'Angelo represented Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, a wealthy Communist capitalist who had set up a publishing house. Naively enough, Feltrinelli had no idea he might offend Soviet authorities, because he obtained the book during a brief window in which it looked as if freedom was the order of the day. Khrushchev had just delivered his 'secret speech' denouncing Stalin's crimes. To use the jargon of the day, this was to be 'the thaw.' But within months Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary to put down a revolt against Soviet domination, and things started freezing over again. By the time Feltrinelli realized that Doctor Zhivago would be banned in the socialist paradise, he had already accepted the view of one Italian Russian specialist that not to publish the novel would constitute 'a crime against culture.'"
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Photos: Lucerne
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Poem: Nicholas Samaras, "Mitali Restaurant"
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