REVIEWS
Selected literary reviews for publications such as The Berlin Review of Books, The Spectator, Review 31 and Toronto Star
Russian literature
Selected reviews
‘He used to say it was frenzied, but beautiful’
Review of Dostoevsky and the Epileptic Mode of Being, by Paul Fung
Review 31, 18 February 2015
The trouble with Dostoevsky can be knowing where to start. It doesn't seem to matter if you're a novice reader, a seasoned aesthete or a professional literary critic. He's too verbose, too serious; too intent on piercing the heart of the matter in hand (‘and till my ghastly tale is told/this heart within me burns’, as Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner declared). There are those who find all this extremity a little unbearable. But Dostoevsky held ideals, and his work overflows with designs for their realisation. It was precisely this that fuelled his immense capacity for anger, which, although directed mainly towards nihilism, extends to anyone obtuse enough to settle for mere happiness.
Since his death in 1881, Dostoevsky’s keenest readers have had plenty to argue about. One can delve into the receptions of 19th-century Russian mystics, confront the force of Nietzsche or Freud's readings, plunge into Mikhail Bakhtin’s studies of his aesthetics and ethics, witness (in an unlikely pairing) Christian fundamentalists or avant-gardists prising him out of context, or achieve total immersion in Joseph Franks’s vast, voluminous biography, which took more than 30 years to complete. And while for some, Dostoevsky is a quintessential Mosaic prophet, for others he's a revolutionary, standing stoutly on the barricades. He's lauded by Archbishops (see Rowan Williams’s 2010 Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction), as well as likely young troublemakers – it's not hard to picture the dog-eared pages of Russell Brand's copy of Crime and Punishment.
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Vehemence and doubt: Dostoevsky up close and personal
Review essay of The Dostoevsky Archive, by Peter Sekirin
The Berlin Review of Books, 30 November 2013
What intellectual or moral use does it have to think about a writer’s life? Supposing mere fame and fortune are transitory vicarious interests, is it at the same time unrewarding to follow a writer through some of his or her days? We have the work, the text to read and academically treat, to intertextually reference in books, films or even YouTube ads, the words and ideas there at the beginning and at the end. Take Shakespeare, as many have done, as a prime example of why we can supposedly ignore what writers get up to. Little to nothing is known about the Bard as a biological and social fact in the world, about his life and career. What we do have from him, though, in terms of his artistic production, is often seen as all one could possibly wish for. And yet, there is something inextricably peculiar in arguing that not having that which we do not possess in the first place, whatever our opinion on the matter, makes us just rich enough. An absolute rejection of the unknown does not ultimately hold much persuasive power.
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Review essay of Transnational Tolstoy: Between the West and the World, by John Burt Foster Jr.
The Cambridge Quarterly, June 2014
ONE CAN CONFIDENTLY ASSUME that Bristol University's Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Henry Gifford (1913–2003), knew several, perhaps even many, people born in the nineteenth century. Growing up in London, attending Harrow and Christ Church, Oxford, serving in the Royal Armoured Corps during the war, and lecturing at Bristol University from 1946, Gifford presumably dealt with various individuals for whom at least some part of the 1800s was first-hand experience. The impact of that century, furthermore, would have been strongly evident in his lifetime at the level of certain institutions, cultural customs, language, and so forth, making itself felt even to those most fervently seeking modernity. It was perhaps such direct knowledge which lay behind a particularly striking remark in Gifford's finely detailed essay on translating Tolstoy, first published in 1978. In its opening paragraph, Gifford argues that Tolstoy presents relatively few obstacles to his twentieth-century readers, whether in the original Russian or in translation, bolstering his aesthetic impact.
"Tolstoy's milieu still … remains largely accessible to us … Despite the immense upheavals of political and industrial revolution in Russia, the last five or six decades of the Empire, during which Tolstoy wrote, are … present to our imaginations … the historical imagination is hardly needed to call up the world in which Tolstoy lived."
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Novels
Selected reviews
Review of Theft, by Luke Brown
Review 31, 14 November 2020
Paul Wright is a thirty-something part-time bookseller and magazine writer. With self-conscious downbeat humour, Paul-as-narrator tells us how he writes two pages for a magazine called White Jesus; one about books, one about haircuts:
"I set forth in Hackney and Peckham, approach strangers, and ask if I can snap a picture to feature in the London Review of Haircuts. Alongside their picture in the magazine and online I award their hairstyle between one and five pairs of scissors. . . Hair criticism is not a hard science — it is more akin to the interpretation of dreams . . . I type a witty summary of what the person attached to the haircut is like, a précis of their secrets and longings, in fifteen to twenty words."
Paul lives precariously in East London, in a flatshare in which a series of people sleep in the living room, in each other's beds and sometimes disappear for months. We're in 2016, and our not-quite-down-and-out hero is intellectually anti-capitalist, politically anti-Brexit, emotionally adrift and morally, well...
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Review of Specimen, by Irina Kovalyova
Toronto Star, 12 June 2015
Art and science are typically seen as polar opposites. Whereas art can be held up as the arena for personal expression and emotion, scientists are supposed to embody rationality and objectivity. And yet, recent thinking has shown that this conception is historical rather than timeless.
Some 200 years ago for example, Goethe could easily publish his collected literary works before switching to botany and the theory of colours — a crossover harder to imagine nowadays. That said, recent scientific theory has seen a partial reintroduction of intuition and esthetics, acknowledging that an impersonal mode of thought can leave much unsaid. In film and literature, meanwhile, there can be a fascination with seeing the two worlds collide, from the repeated depiction of Brueghel’s The Hunters in the Snow on board the spaceship in Tarkovsky’s Solaris to John Banville’s Kepler and Sean Michaels’ Us Conductors.
Imagine, now, a Belarus-born intern for NASA. A gifted scholar, who goes on to attain a Masters in chemistry, a PhD in microbiology & immunology and a senior lectureship at a top Canadian university (Simon Fraser). Most people might imagine a dedicated and earnest scientist. You’d be forgiven for not guessing that Irina Kovalyova writes short stories when not teaching — stories with a highly developed sense of desire, in which children and parents miss each other and in which God comes in quietly, in half formulated thoughts. In which science is one of the main subjects, yet hardly ever the most interesting one. Kovalyova may or may not have a taste for Bach’s Goldberg Variations and frog dissection, but she can certainly write fiction.
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History & politics
Selected reviews
Review of Lenin on the Train, by Catherine Merridale
The Spectator, 8 October 2016
"Full allowance must be made for the desperate tasks to which the German war leaders were already committed… Nevertheless it was with a sense of awe that they turned upon Russia the most grisly of weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland to Russia."
As so often, Churchill has the best lines. Here he is about one of the most famous episodes in European history: the safe passage given to Lenin by a Germany desperate for victory in the first world war. As long as German high command could dream up ways to eliminate the threat from either the West or East, there was hope it would not suffer defeat.
Lenin, as Churchill wrote, was imperial Russia’s ‘Vengeance’. Germany thought Lenin’s arrival in Russia could mean an early end to the war, as he had so often denigrated the imperialist-capitalist war effort. In fact, they were spectacularly wrong, because the Bolsheviks proved to be as militaristic as their autocratic predecessors.
In 1917, Lenin was living in exile in Switzerland, acutely aware that history was in danger of overtaking him. The February revolution had come as something of a surprise; even after decades of plotting the Tsar’s demise, Russia’s revolutionaries were presented with Nicholas II’s swift abdication after a popular revolt.
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The elite who tried to save Russia
Review of Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia, by Dominic Lieven
The Spectator, 30 May 2015
The veteran Russian historian Dominic Lieven’s new study of Russia’s descent towards the first world war is deeply researched, highly valuable in its focus on Russia, and unfailingly well-written: more proof of Lieven’s profound knowledge of the Russian empire.
One of his earlier works, Russia’s Rulers Under the Old Regime (1989), focused on the 150 men who ran Russia until 1917. Towards the Flame shares that work’s careful attention to a tiny elite of well-educated, cosmopolitan, mostly aristocratic men. With breathtaking directness, he says that fewer than 50 men (and it was all men) in Europe in 1914 took the decisions that led their countries into war.
Towards the Flame starts with a few donnish chapters from what Lieven calls the ‘God’s eye view’. We learn about Europe’s struggles with nationalism, geopolitics and international economics. Though Lieven is not the first to say so, it is useful to be reminded that either Germany or Russia could have gained mastery of Europe by avoiding war and developing their industries instead. Russia was a giant in the making, before the calamity that was its 20th (and, arguably, the start of its 21st) century.
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'Spain in Our Hearts': Americans who went gaga for the Spanish Civil War
Review of Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, by Adam Hochschild
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 19 June 2016
Are there times when military intervention in foreign disputes is justified? Can there ever be enough moral urgency to send Americans abroad to fight? Did not Vietnam, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Iraq prove the need for diplomacy or even isolationism, rather than belligerence?
These are the fascinating questions underpinning Adam Hochschild’s colorful if flawed new history of the Spanish Civil War “Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30). The author starts by noting his admiration for 1960s radicalism, in which he participated. And yet, he realizes leftwing politics can fail by refusing to take on evil. In Mr. Hochschild’s view, the Spanish Civil War proved to be a time when squaring up to reaction was morally right.
The book tells the story of a handful of Americans who felt compelled to do their bit, in spite of the official U.S. stance of non-intervention. Trouble had been brewing in Spain for years, intensified by the 1931 constitution of the Second Spanish Republic. Although the rise of the Left was widely cheered, other parts of Spain were (and remain to this day) deeply conservative, respecting tradition, the Catholic Church and the monarchy.
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Philosophy
Selected reviews
Review of Only Connect: Learned Societies in Nineteenth-Century Britain, by William C. Lubenow
The Weekly Standard, 16 December 2016
Fundamentally, the world of sensory experience is raw and ruthless. Chaos abounds, and events flow into one another without rhyme or reason. There are no clear beginnings or endings; no sense of triumph or despair. There is no Heaven or Hell. At its most innocent, the human mind is overwhelmed easily, subject to the brute forces of nature. Our saving grace, however, is our power of perception: Perception helps us to develop critical and imaginative faculties. These turn into thinking, which can transform the raw materials of the world into dispassionate theories.
And yet, a blessing though it is, thought is also finite. The world is tamed temporarily only; theories fall out of use or are superseded by the strange and unexpected. This permanent precariousness can be faced in many ways, yet surely the most admirable combines good manners, a healthy dose of stoicism, and a probing intelligence.
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The Realization of Something New: The Life of the World to Come
Review essay of Vladimir Solov’ëv’s Justification of the Moral Good, by Vladimir Soloviev, edited and translated by Thomas Nemeth
The Berlin Review of Books, 13 September 2016
If stones and metals had been its only building blocks, the world would not have woken from its deep sleep. It could rely, however, on the life-will of the most basic bacteria. Although life’s first stirrings cannot be traced to its roots, even by foremost minds such as Charles Darwin, one can observe the apparently unreflective attraction of elementary creatures to light and warmth. Higher up in evolution’s chain, animals are driven by a desire for sensation and free movement. They satisfy their hunger and sexual needs when they can and must. Human beings, Nature’s crowning glory, go far beyond other life-forms in their rationality and self-consciousness. We philosophise and dream in ways plants and animals cannot begin to comprehend. Biologists, however, fail to address the most valuable question of all. What is the point of existence? It is, of course, the world’s perfection into the Kingdom of God. Our Saviour showed the way, and history since then has been a series of small achievements and big failures. And it will be when we feel shame about our bestiality, pity for all that lives and reverence for the all-powerful God that we can achieve our destiny: a spiritually perfected existence.
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'How the French Think': an elegant, but incomplete, introduction to French intellectual life
Review of How the French Think: An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People, by Sudhir Hazareesingh
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 29 November 2015
How the French Think: An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People, by Sudhir Hazareesingh, is an accessible overview of French intellectual life that ignores the baleful influence of Islamist terrorism. I take it to be indisputable that French Muslims constitute a diverse community. Yet equally true is the perverse interpretation of Islam by Daesh (the preferred appellation in France for the criminals who call themselves Islamic State; let’s go with the French), whose nihilism is widespread.
Some French citizens seek to terrorize. Probably they haven’t read their Rousseau, but they are still French and they do still think (appallingly). And this isn’t new: They’ve been active for years now. Daesh may be distasteful, but ignoring its power is this book’s major flaw.
So what does this study, by Oxford University academic Sudhir Hazareesingh, give us? It provides an elegant introduction to the classic French intellectual. High-minded yet argumentative; universalist yet in love with the countryside; inherently proud yet anxious. Talk to most people about French thought and the same stereotypes are likely to recur. “That’s good in practice, but does it work in theory?” is famous; the well-tailored aesthete, never wearing his glasses but waving them in the air as he holds forth is another. Indeed, many French intellectuals are extroverts. This makes them easy to understand (superficially at least), and characterize (or perhaps caricature).
A well-considered appreciation of mainstream French thought, from Descartes to Derrida is this book’s main selling point.
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