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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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Monthly Archives: June 2015
Jocelyn Brooke’s ‘Drawn Sword’ — An English ‘Death in Venice’?
I was reading Jocelyn Brooke during a period of thinking again about an old love, the German genius Thomas Mann. Brooke is a serious-minded English writer from the mid twentieth century. He was a fine stylist, and with that went … Continue reading
Posted in Art History, Things German, Who are you?, Writing
Tagged Benjamin Britten, books, Criticism, defining beauty, English Romantic Modernism, john piper, literature, music, myfanwy piper, Novels, opera, things german, Thomas Mann, writing
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Lesley Chamberlain 