Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Jennifer Wilson

Jennifer Wilson is a contributing essayist at The New York Times Book Review. She holds a Ph.D. in Russian literature from Princeton. (November 2022)

The Agony of Sophia Tolstoy

Frederick Wiseman resurrects the wife of the famed Russian writer only to reduce her to the sum of her grievances.

November 22, 2022

The First Russian

An unfinished novel about his African great-grandfather provides the best sense of how Pushkin considered his own Blackness.

Peter the Great’s African: Experiments in Prose

by Alexander Pushkin, translated from the Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Boris Dralyuk, edited by Robert Chandler

August 18, 2022 issue

Letter

Kathleen Parthé

Cover-ups & ‘Uncoverings’

September 22, 2022 issue

Wounded soldiers resting with a nurse, Civil War, circa 1864

From the Battlefield to ‘Little Women’

Louisa May Alcott’s letters home from the front lines, later published as Hospital Sketches (1863), proved that her true gift lay not in inventing new worlds, but in observing the one around her.

August 28, 2019

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