It is the morning of May 12, 1892, and the Lithuanian-born landscape painter Isaac Ilyich Levitan has just left his home and studio on Moscow’s leafy Bolshoy Trekhsvyatitelsky Lane to spend the summer sketching and painting amid the endless expanse…
I The Hall of the Order of St. Catherine is the most intimate of the five staterooms within the forbidding walls of the Grand Kremlin Palace. Lacking the martial character of the Hall of the Order of St. George, and…
How far Lord Minamoto no Muneyuki had fallen. His grandfather was the former Emperor Kōkō, and his father the Imperial Prince Koretada, yet in the year 894 A.D. Muneyuki found himself reduced to commoner status by his uncle, the reigning Emperor…
Imagine my surprise upon learning, contrary to popular belief and received opinion, that the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle never existed. The vast Corpus Aristotelicum, including the Metaphysics, the Politics, the Poetics, and the Nicomachean Ethics — all medieval forgeries. Aristotle’s…
The gray mantle of evening had finally shrouded the light of a balmy midsummer’s day, and the good citizens of Doylestown, Pennsylvania were busy trimming their lamps and preparing their beds for the night when all of a sudden news…
Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter By Gary Saul Morson (Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 512 pages, $38) Four Bolsheviks have gone on a picnic, and as they enjoy…
The following account contains graphic descriptions of the deaths of victims of the Cultural Revolution in China. La desvergüenza con que el revolucionario mata espanta más que sus matanzas. (The shamelessness with which the revolutionary kills is more frightening than…
Borys Tymofiyovych Romantschenko was born in 1926 to a farming family living in Bondari, a modest village in Ukraine’s Sumy Oblast, and it was there, amidst the wide fields, the meandering rivers, and the open heavens of picturesque Sumshchyna that…
Los países de literatura indigente tienen historia desabrida. [Countries with an impoverished literature have an insipid history.] — Nicolás Gómez Dávila It has become something of an autumn tradition. The leaves change their verdant hues, mothballed sweaters come out of…
Fifteen days into Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, the foreign ministers of the two warring countries met in the Turkish resort town of Antalya, where they would discuss potential resolutions to what was already the largest European conflict since 1945….