All the town’s gripped in an icy fist.
Trees and walls and snow are set in glass.
I pick my timid way across the crystal.
Unsteadily the painted sledges pass.
Flocks of crows above St Peter’s, wheeling.
The dome amongst the poplars, green and pale in
subdued and dusty winter sunlight, and
echoes of ancient battles that come stealing
out across the proud, victorious land.
All of a sudden, overhead, the poplars
rattle, like glasses ringing in a toast,
as if a thousand guests were raising tumblers
to celebrate the marriage of their host.
“But in the exiled poet’s hideaway
the muse and terror fight their endless fight
throughout the night.
So dark a night will never see the day.”
In the interview quoted above, Nabokov also said: “I am ready to accept any regime – Socialistic, Royalistic, Janitorial, – provided mind and body are free.”
[The Nabokov interview is collected in Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor (ed. Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy, Knopf, 2019).]
“I’m at home now. Before Easter I spent two weeks in Ostroumov’s clinic coughing blood. The doctor diagnosed apical lesions in my lungs. I feel splendid.”
I haven’t visited a library since March 17, and I was getting itchy. I have a roomful of books but needed a transfusion, so I ordered old reliables -- the three Library of America volumes of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s stories and the new Chekhov collection, Fifty-Two Stories, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
LEANNE SMITH. What Matters to Australia’s Young Citizens?
If we want our children to have a stake in our democracy and our society, we have to treat them as valued citizens and engage with their concerns. Not because of the leaders they might one day be, in our own projection of what that means, but recognising their legitimacy and leadership as it stands today. Continue reading
BRIAN COYNE: The Bolt-Pell interview: It was “vintage Murdoch”
Stir up the emotions of Benny-Ratz’s little people Continue reading
LAURIE PATTON. Three Blind Mice – Caught in the Netflix trap
Australia’s commercial television networks are in trouble. Not simply because of the Coronavirus but because they failed to develop effective strategies to counter the arrival of Netflix and other ‘streaming’ platforms – something anticipated long before it happened. Continue readingJENNY HOCKING ‘If I were to terminate his commission’: Sir John Kerr’s secret ‘Palace letters on Whitlam’s dismissal
The final act in the landmark ‘Palace letters’ case seeking access to the Queen’s secret correspondence with the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, relating to Kerr’s dismissal of the Whitlam government will play out in the High Court later this month.Continue reading
The passage at the top is from a letter Chekhov wrote to the novelist Alexander Ertel on this date, April 17, in 1897. That same year he wrote “The Petcheneg” and “In the Cart” (both included in the Pevear/Volokhonsky collection), among other stories. Chekhov continues:
“There’s no news. Literature is at a standstill. A lot of tea and cheap wine is being consumed in editorial offices without much pleasure, for no other reason, apparently, than there’s nothing better to do. Tolstoy’s writing on art.”
Tolstoy had visited Chekhov at the clinic on March 28. Chekhov rejected two of the themes of Tolstoy’s soon-to-be-published What Is Art? Here they are, as paraphrased by Simon Karlinsky: 1.) “[T]he idea that in order to be good, moral and ‘infectious,’ a work of art has to be instantly comprehensible to an illiterate peasant or to a child.” 2.) “[T]he concomitant notion that all the arts and especially painting and music were going through a period of utter decline throughout the Western world at the end of the nineteenth century.” Chekhov writes to Ertel:
“His idea is not new; it’s been reiterated in various forms by clever old men in every century. Old men have always been inclined to think the end of the world is at hand and to assert that morals have fallen to the ne plus ultra, that art has grown shallow and threadbare, that people have grown weak, and so on and so forth.