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- Russia in my lifetime : a tragic story Central Moscow in April 1992 was a jumble sale. Trestle tables obstructed the pavements, old counterpanes covered them. Mostly older people, mostly women, displayed trinkets for sale: a cup, a few beads, a spare tin. Outside the Bolshoi Theatre sheet music – bound conductors’ scores even– waited for a chance buyer. They were like cultural treasure turned out of safe-keeping by a marauding army. Over in Sokolniki park at the Sunday market Red Army uniforms were going for a song. The entire Soviet past was ridiculed. It made me feel uncomfortable. I cast my mind back twenty years earlier to my first contact with Communist Russia, when a planeload of young Western visitors who should have known better applauded when we took off for home again. Mostly they didn’t like the food. In Nizhny Novgorod I knew a woman who had been an Intourist travel guide. She knew her lines by heart. ‘You tell the visitor so much they don’t need to ask questions. Isn’t that right, Lesley?’ Galya had a nervous breakdown when both her technique and her beloved knowledge of Soviet history and culture were made redundant overnight. The Cold War, and its end, were a painful business.
- The Old Men at the Zoo: Novelist Angus Wilson (1913-1991) on the Riot of post-war Britain
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- A Meeting with Isaiah Berlin and a few reflections on his quarrel with Roger Scruton
- From Weimar to Washington: The Collapse of the House of Bourgeois Ideas – Part 1
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- Letter to Nietzsche
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Monthly Archives: February 2013
Russian Misery at the Saatchi Gallery
The irony is a bit heavy by Western standards. To call this show ‘Gaiety is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union’ is redundant. On the other hand what name can you put on human suffering which is a … Continue reading
Two Gay Novels
An interest in the Paris scene drew me to Tristan Garcia’s Hate A Romance. It appeared in the UK in 2011 in a superb translation, after winning France’s Prix de Flore for its 27-year-old author in 2008. The mixture of mad politics, hatred … Continue reading
Posted in Who are you?, Writing
Tagged books, Criticism, literature, Novels, writing
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Lesley Chamberlain 