Advanced Search

Gary Saul Morson

Gary Saul Morson is the Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities and a Professor in the Slavic Languages and Literatures Department at Northwestern. Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities, cowritten with Morton Scha­piro, was published last year. (February 2018)

IN THE REVIEW

The Horror, the Horror

A photograph of Isaac Babel taken by the NKVD after his arrest, circa 1939

The Essential Fictions

by Isaac Babel, edited and translated from the Russian by Val Vinokur

Red Cavalry

by Isaac Babel, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk
On January 17, 1940, Stalin approved the sentences of 346 prominent people, including the dramaturge Vsevolod Meyerhold, the former NKVD (secret police) chief Nikolai Yezhov, and the writer Isaac Babel. All were shot. Babel had been arrested on May 15, 1939, in the middle of the night, and, the story goes, he remarked to an NKVD officer: “So, I guess you don’t get much sleep, do you?” Grim wit was Babel’s trademark.

Will We Ever Pin Down Pushkin?

Alexander Pushkin; painting by Pyotr Konchalovsky, 1932

Strolls with Pushkin

by Andrei Sinyavsky, translated from the Russian by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Slava I. Yastremski

The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the End of a Beautiful Friendship

by Alex Beam
Who was Alexander Pushkin? Russians regard him as their greatest writer, greater even than Lev Tolstoy. Edmund Wilson, once one of America’s best-known public intellectuals, pronounced him “the greatest poet of the nineteenth century.” But for those who do not know Russian, the reasons for this praise remain elusive. In …

Herzen: The Hero of Skeptical Idealism

‘Herzen Against Herzen’; photograph by Sergei Lvovich Levitsky, 1865

The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen

by Aileen M. Kelly
To some, Alexander Herzen commands respect as “the first Russian socialist,” to others as the best debunker of revolutionary dreams. Born in 1812, he was the illegitimate son of a wealthy aristocrat, who gave him the German surname Herzen (meaning “of the heart”) in tribute to the boy’s mother, a …