I Confucius arrived in the Chinese capital one cold winter’s morning and proceeded down broad avenues and through splendid gateways before reaching the very heart of the city, where he took up a commanding position on the eastern side of…
A beggar’s book outworths a noble’s blood. —Henry VIII, Act I, Scene I Above the piano in our living room hangs a painting by the French neo-impressionist Jan Bonal. It is a pointillist Parisian street scene, executed much in the…
Aug. 15, 2023 — Another day, another cosmic horror courtesy of the so-called “Russian world.” The setting this time is Velikiye Luki, the second-largest town in Pskov Oblast, where a solemn ceremony is being held on the sprawling grounds of…
I It is Aug. 13, 1944, and the streets of Warsaw are clogged with barricades and mounds of rubble, burn-out vehicles and fallen streetlamps, bent iron pipes and tangled electrical cables, all interspersed with spent cartridges and dead bodies. An…
Each morning we remind ourselves of all the lives that have been lost. In the afternoon, we savor the sun shining outside the window. The fresh grass rising up among dead rocks. And in the evening we remind ourselves once…
On April 9, 2021, the Chinese Cyberspace Administration’s Central Network Information Office Reporting Center for Illegal and Undesirable Information promulgated a circular letter concerning the pervasive and unwelcome presence of “harmful information involving historical nihilism” on the internet. Citing the…
Some four hundred thousand visitors pass through the wrought iron gates of the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague each year, most of them, we may safely presume, with the intention of viewing the institution’s most prized possession: Johannes Vermeer’s Meisje…
Испепеляющие годы! Безумья ль в вас, надежды ль весть? От дней войны, от дней свободы — Кровавый отсвет в лицах есть. These years of conflagration, Is there madness in you, or is there hope? These days of war, these days…
The Savoyard diplomat Joseph de Maistre, writing to his Russian counterpart Prince Pyotr Borisovich Kozlovsky in the autumn of 1815, could not help but express his profound displeasure with the amoral nature of the czarist bureaucracy. “Some strange spirit of…
“Manuscripts don’t burn,” or so the devil Woland tells us in Mikhail Bulgakov’s darkly comedic novel The Master and Margarita. In Bulgakov’s magical realist literary universe, the devil might very well pluck a manuscript unharmed from a blazing stove, but…