“Who?”  This was said in a tone of voice that could only be described as doubtful.  I was on the phone with an Italian friend in London, explaining that I could not call him back later that evening because I was off to a concert.  “It’s Gergiev, Valery Gergiev.  Don’t you know?  He’s the most...

When I hear of the books in the history of publishing that were self-published, I react like Lenin, who, on hearing of the 5,000 print run of Mayakovsky’s poem 150,000,000, scoffed that it was “a colossal waste of paper.” E.E. Cummings, for instance, published The Enormous Room at his own expense, petulantly dedicating it to...

If you’ve read enough Dickens, England is the land of coincidence, so I was not surprised to hear that a friend had sold his Northamptonshire family seat to a Russian.  Nor was the congenital gambler in me incredulous when I learned that the new master of the estate was a keen reader of my stuff...

The rockets that, according to Khru­sh­­chev, were coming off his production line “like sausages” ran on kerosene and liquid oxygen.  So did Soviet foreign policy.  The kerosene was operational secrecy, an ingredient virtually unchanged since the 1920’s, whereby the regime concealed its expansionist aims.  The oxygen was maniacal braggadocio, which persuaded the West to see...

Thirteen years ago I marched in one of the largest demonstrations in Britain’s history.  The Countryside March had brought together environmental activists and critics of transnational business, dyed-in-the-wool Tories and leftover beatniks, peers and paupers.  Today, if the ongoing Coalition versus the Countryside debate is any indication, it’s time to march again. In Greece, Megalopoli...

When the first of the truly modern “modern politicians” straddled the front page, even the meliorism junkies of the New York Times deemed it proper to lament the creature’s arrival and to bemoan its lack of substance.  But the journalists, as always, had no clue.  In an age when money is not only paper but...

When you ask a Russian of my generation or older about conspiracy theories, Kirov is the name that wanders into his mind as readily as the name Kennedy springs to yours.  Thirty years and an ocean separate these deaths, whose aim, in both cases, was not so much the elimination of a political rival as...

The document I am reading is public.  It is an official directive of the Russian government to the ministries responsible for directing the country’s electronic industry, dated August 7, 2007, identified as “Government of the Russian Federation Order No311,” and entitled “Strategic Development of Electronics in Russia 2007-2025.” Last February, totalitarian power in the person...

The townhouse at 18 Belgrave Square consisted of 74 living rooms, salons, corridors, servants’ pantries, stair­­cases, anterooms, and closets, and in 1866 it was deemed suitable to become the new London residence of the Austrian ambassador.  The commodious townhouse had gone up early in the century as part of Thomas Cubitt’s development of Belgrave Square,...

On occasion I have written here about the evils of photography, while other readers of this magazine may remember my having voiced more general apprehensions with respect to the transformation undergone by the human mind in an age when, by pressing a button, a suburban housewife may proclaim herself Baudelaire or Monet.  Recently, I found...

Everybody laughed at me as usual.  The state of absolute passivity outwardly resembling the comatose, but distinguishable from it by voluntary alimentation and libation, was derided by my friends as unattainable.  A Sicilian mirage. Yet it had been an idée fixe for years, my vision of a holiday so impeccably philistine it would reduce me...

Kierkegaard recalls somewhere that Caligula wanted to behead all of Rome.  One can almost see his point.  The news that comes over the transom is so uniformly bleak, so predictably monstrous, that it cannot but produce this kind of response in any number of men of good will.  After all, it is mankind itself that...

On the way to the airport we were stuck in systaltic traffic, my taciturn Charon and I, and the weather mimicked the condition, blazing with sunshine like a Neapolitan urchin’s smile one moment, dourly hawking tickets to the Museum of British Cloud the next. At times the sky was the color of Delft tile, reminding...

Paseo de Hemingway goes nowhere now.  I was at the last bullfight in Pamplona, the Catalan town beloved of Papa.  On a stuffy night last July, I watched as a bull named Andador, with a flick of the horns identical to the one that had secured Spain her place in the World Cup Final some...

Last summer the inimitable Taki and I were staying under the same roof at the London house of our friend Natasha.  I have loved our angelically guileless hostess for a quarter of a century, Taki since she was a baby, but all this is just a pompous way of relating that, like I this fateful...

You do not need to be a reader of this column to surmise that the South of Italy is as close as one can get to Paradise without being a Nazi war criminal, in which case, needless to say, one resides in South America.  We’ve got everything in Sicily, from medlars in springtime and tangerines...

When, in 1934, Stalin had a Leningrad party boss killed—and then wept at the man’s funeral, railing at the enemies of Russia—a uniquely modern phenomenon, which I shall call state vendetta, was born.  State vendetta is somewhere between conventional warfare and mafia violence.  Where the narrow aim of the former is to suppress a specific...

I have always hated students, a class as concrete to my mind as workers were to Karl Marx’s, a race as particular in my imagination as the Jews were in Alfred Rosenberg’s.  Visiting a city like Florence, for me, is a painful experience, somewhere between what joining a gay-rights march would be for Taki or...

Of late I have been writing a good deal for Russian publications, including Snob, which has now given me a weekly column.  Never in my wildest dreams did I think that my mother tongue would provide me with something like material comfort.  A thorny path of spiritual improvement?  Possibly.  A way of finding better vodka,...

Tarkovsky’s Solaris came out in 1972, which was the year I’d left Russia.  It was not until a quarter of a century later that I watched the long and quaint film, and was strangely affected by it.  I had always thought that nothing on the screen, if it was any good at all, could not...

Britain was tense last October when the BBC announced that Nick Griffin, head of the British National Party, would be interviewed on one of its programs.  They’s fightin’ again at the BBC, said a London cabdriver.  It was front-page news for two weeks before the interview, and what began on the morning after could only...

A quarter of a century ago, when I started writing for this magazine, I was the Russian.  Along with the sense of exclusivity it afforded, that simple tag gave its owner a clear run through the 1980’s and 90’s on both sides of the Atlantic.  I was the only Russian in any crowd, whether as...

A few months ago in this space I described the Pecorino Effect, referring not so much to the Italian cheese as to the shopper’s inability to refuse any merchandise he has sampled, irrespective of what he thinks of the quality.  I diagnosed this modern malady, with myself as a specimen of social tissue in the...

In the middle of the 19th century, Sydney Dobell wrote a poem that contained the following line: “Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!”  This excursion into the absurd c. 1850 is readily recognized by readers of American poems or novels c. 1950 as a cry of the soul in torment.  The...

In the 1970’s, one hardly ever heard the word atheist.  One had the impression that the impassive majority never considered the subject long enough to have made the term a part of their active vocabulary; while the typical exception would proffer, with an upraised finger and a coy smirk, something along the lines of “let’s...

On the flight to Bombay—which a British single mother with an addiction to horse tranquilizers, or a benefits administrator dispensing them, would call Mumbai—I came across a Times of India news report entitled “6,000 Ulema back fatwa on Terror.”  I recalled that the first time I heard the word fatwa was in connection with Salman...

Sometimes it seems that I have become the master of a single plaintive note, sung by the disembodied voice of the patron saint of grasshoppers, Marie Antoinette, from somewhere beyond the tomb.  And it is true that often, when I reread whatever I have written, I am reminded of Russian dictionaries of fenya, or for...

A shopkeeper in the Vucciria market in Palermo offers me a taste of local peccorino cheese on the tip of something that looks like a machete.  It is a classic Proustian moment.  The inner mouse accepts, nibbles at the wedge with a thoughtful face, and goes for three quarters of a kilo.  Is there a...

A splendid Traviata at Palermo’s Teatro Massimo the other night—with its colorful gambling scene at the close of the Second Act, when a jealous Alfredo wins an armful of banknotes only to throw them in Violetta’s face—made me think of nothing.  Nothing as an end in itself, nothing as the animating spirit of all sublunar...

In Dürrenmatt’s The Visit, an aging billionairess returns to the provincial town where she was born and announces to the townsfolk that she will leave them all her money, on one condition.  They must kill the man, himself now aging, who deceived her years ago.  The townsfolk noisily reject the lady’s proposition as immoral, but...

The neighbor’s house sported a prato inglese that required ostentatious watering at the crack of dawn, and by the reassuring suppleness of the English lawn beneath our feet we all knew that our host was a gentleman, not some television mogul from Cinecittà out of Rome whom, of a morning, one would be embarrassed to...

In the 1970’s, when I lived in America, McDonald’s, apart from being a fast-food chain, was a powerful symbol of everything that was wrong with that country.  Neither I nor anybody I knew ever referred to the leviathan as a source of nourishment; invariably, its name was placed in a quarantine of ironic quotation marks,...

Cimabue the painter, passing on the road to Bologna, saw, as he walked through the village of Vespignano, a boy called Giotto drawing a sheep on a flat piece of rock.  This was the moment with which, more than a century later, Lorenzo Ghiberti, the sculptor and the first art historian of the Renaissance, began...

“Curious Barbara’s got her nose in a sling,” goes the Russian admonition against prurience, more puzzling, if anything, than the equivalent English adage concerning the killing, in similarly umbrageous circumstances, of the cat.  Why should Barbara meet with such a fate?  Just how did it happen that curiosity brought about the death of Fluffy?  As...

“For his birthday his wife gave him a riding crop that cost 100 francs,” a writer called Arnold Ruge complained of his newly married friend, a fellow German émigré in Paris, and the poor fool does not ride, nor has he a horse.  Everything he sees he wants to have, a carriage, smart clothes, a...

Scoffers may deride the proposition I find instinctively plausible, that the consonants and the vowels of speech are its masculine and feminine constituents, though the same scoffers would not think to keep a professor from speaking of male rhymes or an electrician of female plugs.  Yet the role of women in many societies, historically considered,...

If the typical life of a young couple resembles an Oriental bazaar, where the clamoring for jewels, perfumes, spices, silks, and other aphrodisiac appurtenances of fata morgana breaks on the morose tightfistedness of those who can afford them, in my case the reverse was true, not only because I could afford nothing, but because my...