Tag Archive: 0literature

‘The death of Stalin in 1953 brought about a gradual, partial relaxation of the terror that for decades had governed the attitudes of the Soviet populace, and particularly the intelligentsia.  At the height of the cold war, Soviet isolation from the West had been so complete and Soviet doctrine so rigid that genuine cultural contacts […]

Friedo Lampe.  Am Rande der Nacht.  For me, name and title evoked those lighted windows from which you cannot tear your gaze.  You are convinced that, behind them, somebody whom you have forgotten has been awaiting your return for years, or else that there is no longer anybody there.  Only a lamp, left burning in […]

‘”Edgar Poe—the underground stream in Russia.”  So the Russian Symbolist poet Aleksandr Blok noted in his journal for November 6, 1911, a topic for a future critical study.  The article was never written, but the prospect has remained an enticing one.  For Poe’s fame, however clouded by conflicting interpretation, is of long standing in Russia’ […]

I’m sure that if you asked anyone “what was the first bibliography of eighteenth-century English literature?”, they probably wouldn’t guess that it was published in Berlin:    The book was the brainchild of the great Enlightenment publisher (and Anglophile), Friedrich Nicolai.  In 1789, he wrote a letter to Jeremias David Reuß (1750–1837), under-librarian at the […]

As regular readers here will know, I am always on the lookout for cross-cultural material.  So I was interested in reading two articles on Anglo-German cultural exchange published this week, in The Observer (on Neil MacGregor) and The New Statesman.  In the latter, mention is made of George Eliot and her connection with Germany.  As the article says, […]

This week you find me in my own ‘Editor’s Sanctum’, starting to pull books together for the New York Antiquarian Book Fair next month.  It’s not often that I have a book actually published in America (I leave that to my colleagues over there), but the following recently caught my eye as it relates to […]