[Russica] The NYT on author Gary Shteyngart, and a Russian czar's palace ...

From a New York Times e-mail (via LJB)

The author Gary Shteyngart in Red Hook, N.Y.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

8. Are we ready for a pandemic novel? Gary Shteyngart, the author of “Our Country Friends,” thinks so.

Last year, he was 240 pages into a dystopian comedy when the first wave of the coronavirus hit and dropped it to start a new novel, about a group of old friends who decamp for the country to escape Covid. Now “Our Country Friends” is being lauded as “the great American pandemic novel.” Our reviewer agrees and says it’s Shteyngart’s finest novel yet.

“The constant state where terrible things are happening to every single member of society, where you can’t escape, that’s going to be the new normal,” Shteyngart said. “So we have to change the way we write.” ...

The living room in the reconstructed Alexander Palace, which opened as a museum in August.Mary Gelman for The New York Times

10. And finally, take a tour of a Russian czar’s palace.

For more than a decade, a team of architects and researchers has worked to restore the last home of Nicholas II, the last czar of Russia, to its early-20th-century glory. It was originally built in 1796 by Catherine the Great for her grandson Alexander. Nicholas II — his great-grand-nephew — moved the imperial family to Alexander Palace in St. Petersburg in 1905 to escape the capital on the eve of revolution.

Researchers recreated the interiors by working with a few fuzzy colored pictures, thousands of black-and-white photos, some watercolors, several drapery swatches and memoirs of palace life. In some cases, whole patterns of rugs were recreated from a small corner that managed to sneak into a picture or two. Take a look.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Case for Keeping San Francisco’s Disputed George Washington Murals

Image
Exposure to art — even uncomfortable art — is healthy, stimulating, and worthy of students’ debate. Image The San Francisco Board of Education voted to cover “The Life of Washington,” a mural cycle from 1935-36, at a school named for the first president. Victor Arnautoff’s  frescoes include images of slaves and a dead Native American, which angered some students and parents.  Credit Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times By  Roberta Smith , The New York Times July 26, 2019 512 After half a century of intermittent debate and protest, the  San Francisco Board of Education   voted unanimously  in June to whitewash the 13 murals depicting the life of George Washington that line the halls of a high school named for the first president. The murals’ offense is that they depict some ugly truths about the history of the United States, namely two of its original sins: slavery and the Native American genocid...
Read more

Will Biden’s Fall Be Worse Than His Summer? [Yet another negative media reaction re Biden]

Image
From the Afghan debacle to his economic overreach, the White House has ample reason for alarm. Image from article: President Biden pauses while speaking at the White House, Sept. 24.  By Peggy Noonan , The Wall Street Journal , Sept. 30, 2021 6:43 pm ET The White House should be feeling alarm. It hasn’t been a good summer for the president, and it isn’t looking to be a good fall. The manner and timing of the withdrawal from Afghanistan was a catastrophe that left Americans infuriated and ashamed. The president’s statements and interviews in the aftermath were highly unsuccessful. The testimony of his top military leaders that they advised him to leave 2,500 troops to keep the process safe made him look dodgy. The whole thing was a botch from beginning to end, and it will stick in history. The images it yielded (kids running to the planes, 13 Americans killed as they tried to bring order) seemed to sum up the political moment, making this seem not like merely a bad event for the pre...
Read more

How Sir Francis Drake and Queen Elizabeth I Made England a Global Power

Image
  Image from article: Queen Elizabeth I knighting Francis Drake, 1581. Credit...Alamy   Book Review by Nigel Cliff , The New York Times , March 10, 2021  IN SEARCH OF A KINGDOM Francis Drake, Elizabeth I, and the Perilous Birth of the British Empire By Laurence Bergreen England is a nation divided. In one camp, nationalists decry the diabolical threat to their freedom posed by dastardly Continentals, instead throwing their hopes on a shadow empire of boundless trading opportunities. In the other, pro-Europeans bitterly protest that their country is making a cataclysmic mistake and bide their time. Sound familiar? Just kidding. It’s not Boris Johnson’s Brexit Britain but the England of the late 16th century, the subject of “In Search of a Kingdom.”   In Laurence Bergreen’s colorful assessment, an unlikely alliance between Queen Elizabeth I and Sir Francis Drake empowered English Protestants to see off Continental Catholics and stake out the beginnings of the British ...
Read more