Tag Archives: Russia

Tolstoy and Steinbeck

Posted on April 2, 2023 by Joel D. Hirst

The first time I arrived to Armenia it was spring of 2019. Still cold, the people of Yerevan were bundled tight, cigarettes poking defiantly out of layers of coats and hats and scarfs. There was a snow storm the first … Continue reading →

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Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere

Posted on March 25, 2023 by Joel D. Hirst

There is something epic and humbling about the old Russian masters. There they sat, atop the great Eurasian plain, not Europe’s afterthought but its fount. That which came before; that which is always there. Russia moves in waves. It ebbs … Continue reading →

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Aleksandr Pushkin

Posted on February 4, 2023 by Joel D. Hirst

I have a little porcelain statue of Pushkin I bought at an antique shop in Yerevan, featuring a young curly-headed Aleksandr with a plume pen writing upon a round table. It is from the Soviet period, made in the Lemonosov … Continue reading →

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On “Gulag Archipelago”

Posted on January 22, 2023 by Joel D. Hirst

Most writers have one masterpiece. Everything else that they do is leading up to, or trying to explain, their one great work. A flash of brilliance. It is also likely that the work is not the one they themselves identify … Continue reading →

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Mud and Stars (or maybe ‘A liberal in Russia’?)

Posted on January 7, 2023 by Joel D. Hirst

Sara Wheeler’s book about Russian writers could have been great. She is a good writer, when she can get out of her own way, and clearly knows the subject matter well. In this book, Wheeler takes the reader on a … Continue reading →

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Reviewing “A Hero of Our Time”

Posted on November 27, 2022 by Joel D. Hirst

Mikhail Lermontov straddled the mountain ridge of Russian creative culture, between poetry of the ‘intelligentsia’ during the days of high empire and the period of prose that both was led by and inspired the revolutionary time of Russia’s coming of … Continue reading →

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The Shadow of the Winter Palace

Posted on October 12, 2022 by Joel D. Hirst

I can think of no better place to go to understand the current war in Russia than “The Shadow of the Winter Palace” by Edward Crankshaw. In miniscule detail Crankshaw delves into the minutiae and characters and twists and turns … Continue reading →

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To Talk of Many Things… (Vol. #16 – Russia)

Posted on September 22, 2022 by Joel D. Hirst

I read a lot of Russian literature and history. It is after all the great unknown; a land that lies behind a snowy curtain long after the Iron Curtain fell. A place of philosophy as deep as the cold dark … Continue reading →

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A Letter from Stalin

Posted on August 7, 2022 by Joel D. Hirst

Some people do only one thing, and that if they are lucky. Given the cacophony of life and the myriad people vying for meaning and significance against each other – 8,000,000,000 souls – how to stand out and be counted … Continue reading →

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The Great Gorky

Posted on July 17, 2022 by Joel D. Hirst

Do Russians love to suffer, or do they simply find ways to cope with the difficulties that tribe and geography have subjected them to? One cannot but entertain the idea that Russians, perhaps unwillingly but certainly sometimes enthusiastically, tend to … Continue reading →

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