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Hermione Lee is the renowned biographer of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Penelope Fitzgerald, and, most recently, Tom Stoppard. Stoppard died at the end of last year, so Hermione and I talked about the influence of Shaw and Eliot and Coward on his work, the recent production of The Invention of Love, the role of ideas in Stoppard's writing, his writing process, rehearsals, revivals, movies. We also talked about John Carey, Brian Moore, Virginia Woolf as a critic. Hermione is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. Her life of Anita Brookner will be released in September.TranscriptHenry Oliver: Today I have the great pleasure of talking to Professor Dame Hermione Lee. Hermione was the first woman to be appointed Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, and she is the most renowned and admired living English biographer. She wrote a seminal life of Virginia Woolf. She's written splendid books about people like Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, and my own favorite, Penelope Fitzgerald. And most recently she has been the biographer of Tom Stoppard, and I believe this year she has a new book coming out about Anita Brookner. Hermione, welcome.Hermione Lee: Thank you very much.Oliver: We're mostly going to talk about Tom Stoppard because he, sadly, just died. But I might have a few questions about your broader career at the end. So tell me first how Shavian is Stoppard's work?Lee: He would reply “very close Shavian,” when asked that question. I think there are similarities. There are obviously similarities in the delighting forceful intellectual play, and you see that very much in Jumpers where after all the central character is a philosopher, a bit of a bonkers philosopher, but still a very rational one.And you see it in someone like Henry, the playwright in The Real Thing, who always has an answer to every argument. He may be quite wrong, but he is full of the sort of zest of argument, the passion for argument. And I think that kind of delight in making things intellectually clear and the pleasure in argument is very Shavian.Where I think they differ and where I think is really more like Chekov, or more like Beckett or more in his early work, the dialogues in T. S. Elliot, and less like Shaw is in a kind of underlying strangeness or melancholy or sense of fate or sense of mortality that rings through almost all the plays, even the very, very funny ones. And I don't think I find that in Shaw. My prime reading time for Shaw was between 15 and 19, when I thought that Shaw was the most brilliant grownup that one could possibly be listening to, and I think now I feel less impressed by him and a bit more impatient with him.And I also think that Shaw is much more in the business of resolving moral dilemmas. So in something like Arms and the Man or Man and Superman, you will get a kind of resolution, you will get a sort of sense of this is what we're meant to be agreeing with.Whereas I think quite often one of the fascinating things about Stoppard is the way that he will give all sides of the question; he will embody all sides of the question. And I think his alter ego there is not Shaw, but the character of Turgenev in The Coast of Utopia, who is constantly being nagged by his radical political friends to make his mind up and to have a point of view and come down on one side or the other. And Turgenev says, I take every point of view.Oliver: I must confess, I find The Coast of Utopia a little dull compared to Stoppard's other work.Lee: It's long. Yes. I don't find it dull. But I think it may be a play to read possibly more than a play to see now. And you're never going to get it put on again anyway because the cast is too big. And who's going to put on a nine-hour free play, 50 people cast about 19th-century Russian revolutionaries? Nobody, I would think.But I find it very absorbing actually. And partly because I'm so interested in Isaiah Berlin, who is a very strong presence in the anti-utopianism of those plays. But that's a matter of opinion.Oliver: No. I like Berlin. One thing about Stoppard that's un-Shavian is that he says his plays begin as a noise or an image or a scene, and then we think of him as this very thinking writer. But is he really more of an intuitive writer?Lee: I think it's a terribly good question. I think it gets right at the heart of the matter, and I think it's both. Sorry, I sound like Turgenev, not making my mind up. But yes, there is an image or there is an idea, or there are often two ideas, as it were, the birth of quantum physics and 18th-century landscape gardening. Who else but Stoppard would put those two things in one play, Arcadia, and have you think about both at once.But the image and the play may well have been a dance between two periods of time together in one room. So I think he never knew what the next play was going to be until it would come at him, as it were. He often resisted the idea that if he chose a topic and then researched it, a play would come out of it. That wasn't what happened. Something would come at him and then he would start doing a great deal of research usually for every play.Oliver: What sort of influence did T. S. Elliot have on him? Did it change the dialogue or, was it something else?Lee: When I was working with him on my biography, he gave me a number of things. I had extraordinary access, and we can perhaps come back to that interesting fact. And most of these things were loans he gave them to me to work on. Then I gave them back to him.But he gave me as a present one thing, which was a black notebook that he had been keeping at the time he was writing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and also his first and only novel Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon, which is little known, which he thought was going to make his career. The book was published in the same week that Rosencrantz came up. He thought the novel was going to make his career and the play was going to sink without trace. Not so. In the notebook there are many quotations from T. S. Elliot, and particularly from Prufrock and the Wasteland, and you can see him working them into the novel and into the play.“I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be.” And that sense of being a disconsolate outsider. Ill at ease with and neurotic about the world that is charging along almost without you, and you are having to hang on to the edge of the world. The person who feels themself to be in internal exile, not at one with the universe. I think that point of view recurs over and over again, right through the work, but also a kind of epigrammatical, slightly mysterious crypticness that Elliot has, certainly in Prufrock and in the Wasteland and in the early poems. He loved that tone.Oliver: Yes. When I read your paper about that I thought about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern quite differently. I've always disliked the idea that it's a sort of Beckett imitation play. It seems very Elliotic having read what you described.Lee: There is Beckett in there. You can't get away from it.Oliver: Surface level.Lee: Beckett's there, but I think the sense of people waiting around—Stoppard's favorite description of Rosencrantz was: “It's two journalists on a story that doesn't add up, which is very clever and funny.”Yes. And that sense of, Vladimir going, “What are we supposed to be doing and how are we going to pass the time?” That's profoundly influential on Stoppard. So I don't think it's just a superficial resemblance myself, but I agree that Elliot just fills the tone of that play and other things too.Oliver: In the article you wrote about Stoppard and Elliot, the title is about biographical questing, and you also described Arcadia as a quest. How important is the idea of the quest to the way you work and also to the way you read Stoppard?Lee: I took as the epigraph for my biography of Stoppard a line from Arcadia: “It's wanting to know that makes us matter, otherwise we're going out the way we came in.” So I think that's right at the heart of Stoppard's work, and it's right at the heart of any biographical work, whether or not it's mine or someone else's. If you can't know, in the sense of knowing the person, knowing what the person is like, and also knowing as much as possible about them from different kinds of sources, then you might as well give up.You can't do it through impressions. You've got to do it through knowledge. Of course, a certain amount of intuition may also come into play, though I'm not the kind of biographer that feels you can make things up. Working on a living person, this is the only time I've done that.It was, of course, a very different thing from working on a safely dead author. And I knew Penelope Fitzgerald a little bit, but I had no idea I was going to write her biography when I had conversations with her and she wouldn't have told me anything anyway. She was so wicked and evasive. But it was a set up thing; he asked me to do it. And we had a proper contract and we worked together over several years, during which time he became a friend, which was a wonderful piece of luck for me.I was doing four things, really. One was reading all the material that he produced, everything, and getting to know it as well as I could. And that's obviously the basic task. One was talking to him and listening to him talk about his life. And he was very generous with those interviews. I'm sure there were things he didn't tell me, but that's fine. One was talking to other people about him, which is a very interesting process. And with someone like him who knew everyone in the literary, theatrical, cultural world, you have to draw a halt at some point. You can't talk to a thousand people, or I'd have still been doing it, so you talk to particularly fellow playwrights, directors, actors who've worked with him often, as well as family and friends. And then you start pitting the versions against each other and seeing what stands up and what keeps being said.Repetition's very important in that process because when several people say the same thing to you, then you know that's right. And that quest also involves some actual footsteps, as Richard Holmes would say. Footsteps. Traveling to places he'd lived in and going to Darjeeling where he had been to school before he came to England, that kind of travel.And then the fourth, and to me, in a way, almost the most exciting, was the opportunity to watch him at work in rehearsal. So with the director's permissions, I was allowed to sit in on two or three processes like that, the 50th anniversary production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at the Old Vic with David Lavoie. And Patrick Marber's wonderful production of Leopoldstadt and Nick Hytner's production of The Hard Problem at the National. So I was able to witness the very interesting negotiations going on between Tom and the director and the cast.And also the extraordinary fact that even with a play like Rosencrantz, which is on every school syllabus and has been for 50—however many years—he was still changing things in rehearsal. I can't get over that. And in his view, as he often said, theater is an event and not a text, and so one could see that actual process of things changing before one's very eyes, and that for a biographer, it's a pretty amazing privilege.Oliver: How much of the plays were written during rehearsal do you think?Lee: Oh, 99% of the plays were written with much labor, much precision, much correction alone at his desk. The text is there, the text is written, and everything changes when you go into the rehearsal room because you suddenly find that there isn't enough time with that speech for the person to get from the bed to the door. It's physics; you have to put another line in so that someone can make an entrance or an exit, that kind of thing.Or the actors will say quite often, because they were a bit in awe—by the time he became well known—the actors initially would be a bit in awe of the braininess and the brilliance. And quite often the actors will be saying, “I'm sorry, I don't understand. I don't understand this.” You'd often get, “I don't really understand.”And then he would never be dismissive. He would either say, “No, I think you've got to make it work.” I'm putting words into his mouth here. Or he would say, “Okay, let's put another sentence or something like that.”Oliver: Between what he wrote at his desk and the book that's available for purchase now, how much changed? Is it 10%, 50? You know what I mean?Lee: Yes. You should be talking to his editor at Faber, Dinah Wood. So Faber would print a relatively small number for the first edition before the rehearsal process and the final production. And then they would do a second edition, which would have some changes in it. So 2%. Okay. But crucial sometimes.Oliver: No, sure. Very important.Lee: And also some plays like Jumpers went through different additions with different endings, different solutions to plot problems. Travesties, he had a lot of trouble with the Lenins in Travesties because it's the play in which you've got Joyce and you've got Tristan Tzara and you've got the Lenins, and they're all these real people and he makes him talk.But he was a little bit nervous about the Lenin. So what he gave him to say were things that they had really said, that Lenin had really said. As opposed to the Tzara-Joyce stuff, which is all wonderfully made up. The bloody Lenins became a bit of a problem for him. And so that gets changed in later editions you'll find.Oliver: How closely do you think The Real Thing is based on Present Laughter by Noël Coward?Lee: Oh, I think there's a little bit of Coward in there. Yes, sure. I think he liked Coward, he liked Wilde, obviously. He likes brilliant, witty, playful entertainers. He wants to be an entertainer. But I think The Real Thing, he was proud of the fact that The Real Thing was one of the few examples of his plays at that time, which weren't based on something else. They weren't based on Hamlet. They weren't based on The Importance of Being Earnest. It's not based on a real person like Housman. I think The Real Thing came out of himself much more than out of literary models.Oliver: You don't think that Henry is a bit like the actor character in Present Laughter and it's all set in his flat and the couples moving around and the slight element of farce?The cricket bat speech is quite similar to when Gary Essendine—do you remember that very funny young man comes up on the train from Epping or somewhere and lectures him about the social value of art. And Gary Essendine says, “Get a job in a theater rep and write 20 plays. And if you can get one of them put on in a pub, you'll be damn lucky.” It's like a model for him, a loose model.Lee: Yes. Henry, I think you should write an article comparing these two plays.Oliver: Okay. Very good. What does Stoppardian mean?Lee: It means witty. It means brilliant with words. It means fizzing with verbal energy. It means intellectually dazzling. The word dazzling is the one that tends to get used. My own version of Stoppardian is a little bit different from, as it were, those standard received and perfectly acceptable accounts of Stoppardian.My own sense of Stoppardian has more to do with grief and mortality and a sense of not belonging and of puzzlement and bewilderment, within all that I said before, within the dazzling, playful astonishing zest and brio of language and the precision about language.Oliver: Because it's a funny word. It's hard to include Leopoldstadt under the typical use of Stoppardian, because it's an untypical Stoppard.Lee: One of the things about Leopoldstadt that I think is—let's get rid of that trope about Stoppardian—characteristic of him is the remarkable way it deals with time. Here's a play like Arcadia, all set in the same place, all set in the same room, in the same house, and it goes from a big hustling room, late 19th-century family play, just like the beginning of The Coast of Utopia, where you begin with a big family in Russia and then it moves through the '20s and then into the terrible appalling period of the Anschluss and the Holocaust.And then it ends up after the war with an empty room. This room, is like a different kind of theater, an empty room. Three characters, none of whom you know very well, speaking in three different kinds of English, reaching across vast spaces of incomprehension, and you've had these jumps through time.And then at the very end, the original family, all of whom have been destroyed, the original family reappears on the stage. I'm sorry to tell this for anyone who hasn't seen Leopoldstadt. Because when it happens on the stage, it's an absolutely astonishing moment. As if the time has gone round and as if the play, which I think it was for him, was an act of restitution to all those people.Oliver: How often did he use his charm to get his way with actors?Lee: A lot. And not just actors. People he worked with, film people, friends, companions. Charm is such an interesting thing, isn't it? Because we shouldn't deviate, but there's always a slightly sinister aspect to the word charm as in, a magic charm. And one tends to be a bit suspicious of charm. And he knew he had charm and he was physically very magnetic and good looking and very funny and very attentive to people.But I think the charm, in his case, he did use it to get the right results, and he did use it, as he would say, “to look after my plays.” He was always, “I want to look after my plays.” And that's why he went back to rehearsal when there were revivals and so on. But he wasn't always charming. Patrick Marber, who's a friend of his and who directed Leopoldstadt, is very good on how irritable Stoppard could be sometimes in rehearsal. And I've heard that from other directors too—Jack O'Brien, who did the American productions of things like The Invention of Love.If Stoppard felt it wasn't right, he could get quite cross. So this wasn't a sort of oleaginous character at all. It's not smooth, it's not a smooth charm at all. But yes, he knew his power and he used it, and I think in a good way. I think he was a benign character actually. And one of the things that was very fascinating to me, not only when he died and there was this great outpouring of tributes, very heartfelt tributes, I thought. But also when I was working on the biography, I was going around the world trying to find people to say bad things about him, because what I didn't want to do was write a hagiography. You don't want to do that; there would be no point. And it was genuinely quite hard.And I don't know the theater world; it's not my world. I got to know it a little bit then. But I have never necessarily thought of the theater world as being utterly loving and generous about everybody else. I'm sure there are lots of rivalries and spitefulness, as there is in academic life, all the rest of it. But it was very hard to find anyone with a bad word to say about him, even people who'd come up against the steeliness that there is in him.I had an interview with Steven Spielberg about him, with whom he worked a lot, and with whom he did Empire of the Sun. And I would ask my interviewees if they could come up with two or three adjectives or an adjective that would sum him up, that would sum Stoppard up to them. And when I asked Spielberg this question, he had a little think and then he said, intransigent. I thought, great. He must be the only person who ever stood up to him.Oliver: What was his best film script? Did he write a really great film.Lee: That one. I think partly the novel, I don't know if you know the Ballard novel, the Empire of the Sun, it's a marvelous novel. And Ballard was just a magical and amazing writer, a great hero of mine. But I think what Stoppard did with that was really clever and brilliant.I know people like Brazil, the Terry Gilliam sort of surrealist way. And there's some interesting early work. Most of his film work was not one script; it was little bits that he helped with. So there's famously the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, he did most of the dialogue for Harrison Ford.But there are others like the One Hundred and One Dalmatians, where I think there's one line, anonymously Stoppardian in there. One of the things about the obituaries that slightly narked me was that there, I felt there was a bit too much about the films. Truly, I don't think the film work was—he wanted it to be right and he wanted to get it right—but it wasn't as close to his heart as the theater work. And indeed the work for radio, which I thought was generally underwritten about when he died. There was some terrific work there.Oliver: Yes. And there aren't that many canonical writers who've been great on the radio.Lee: Absolutely. He did everything. He did film, he did radio. He wrote some opera librettos. He really did everything. And on top of that, there was the great work for the public good, which I think is a very important part of his legacy, his history.Oliver: How much crossover influence is there between the different bits of his career? Does the screenwriting influence the theater writing and the radio and so on? Or is he just compartmentalized and able to do a lot of different things?Lee: That's such an interesting question. I don't think I've thought about it enough. I think there are very cinematic aspects to some of the plays, like Night and Day, for instance, the play about journalism. That could easily have been a film.And perhaps Hapgood as well, although it could be a kind of John le Carré type film thriller, though it's such a set of complicated interlocking boxes that I don't know that it would work as a film. It's not one of my favorite players, I must say. I struggle a little bit with Hapgood. But, yes, I'm sure that they fed into each other. Because he was so busy, he was often doing several things at once. So he was keeping things in boxes and opening the lid of that box. But mentally things must have overlapped, I'm sure.Oliver: He once joked that rather than having read Wittgenstein from cover to cover, he had only read the covers. How true is that? Because I know some people who would say he's very clever in everything, but he's not as clever as he looks. It's obviously not true that he only read the covers.Lee: I think there was a phase, wasn't there, after the early plays when people felt that he was—it's that English phrase, isn't it—too clever by half. Which you would never hear anyone in France saying of someone that they were too clever by half. So he was this kind of jazzy intellectual who put all his ideas out there, and he was this sort of self-educated savant who hadn't been to Oxford.There was quite a lot of that about in the earlier years, I think. And a sense that he was getting away with it, to which I would countermand with the story of the writing of The Invention of Love. So what attracted him to the figure of Housman initially was not the painful, suppressed homosexual love story, but the fact that here was this person who was divided into a very pernickety, savagely critical classical editor of Latin and a romantic lyric poet. In order to work out how to turn this into a play, he probably spent about six years taking Latin lessons, reading everything he could read on the history of classical literature. Obviously reading about Housman, engaging in conversation with classical scholars about Housman's, finer points of editorial precision about certain phrases. And what he used from that was the tip of the iceberg. But the iceberg was real.He really did that work and he often used to say that it was his favorite play because he'd so much enjoyed the work that went into it. I think he took what he needed from someone like Wittgenstein. I know you don't like The Coast of Utopia very much, but if you read his background to Coast of Utopia, what went into it, and if you compare what's in the plays, those three plays, with what's in the writing about those revolutionaries, he read everything. He may have magpied it, but he's certainly knows what he's talking about. So I defend him a bit against that, I think.Oliver: Good, good. Did you see the recent production at the Hamstead Theatre of The Invention of Love?Lee: I did, yes.Oliver: What did you think?Lee: I liked it. I thought it was rather beautifully done. I liked those boats rowing around that clicked together. I thought Simon Russell Beale was extremely good, particularly very moving. And very good in Housman's vindictiveness as a critic. He is not a nice person in that sense. And his scornfulness about the women students in his class, that kind of thing. And so there was a wonderful vitriol and scorn in Russell Beale's performance.I think when you see it now, some of the Oxford context is a little bit clunky, those scenes with Jowett and Pater and so on, it's like a bit of a caricature of the context of cultural life at the time, intellectual life at the time. But I think that the trope of the old and the young Housman meeting each other and talking to each other, which I still think is very moving. I thought it worked tremendously well.Oliver: What are Tom Stoppard's poems like?Lee: You see them in Indian Ink where he invents a poet, Flora Crewe, who is a poet who was died young, turn of the century, bold feminist associated with Bloomsbury and gets picked up much later as a kind of Sylvia Plath-type, HD type heroine. And when you look at Stoppard's manuscripts in the Harry Ransom Center in the University of Austin, in Texas, there is more ink spent on writing and rewriting those poems of Flora Crewe than anything else I saw in the manuscript. He wrote them and rewrote them.Early on he wrote some Elliot—they're very like Elliot—little poems for himself. I think there are probably quite a lot of love poems out there, which I never saw because they belong to the people for whom he wrote them. So I wouldn't know about those.Oliver: How consistently did Stoppard hold to a kind of liberal individualism in his politics?Lee: He was accused of being very right wing in the 1980s really, 1970s, 1980s, when the preponderant tendency for British drama was radicalism, Royal Court, left wing, all of that. And Stoppard seemed an outlier then, because he approved of Thatcher. He was a friend of Thatcher. He didn't like the print union. It was particularly about newspapers because he'd been a newspaper man in his youth. That was his alternative university education, working in Bristol on the newspapers. He had a romance heroic feeling about the value of the journalist to uphold democracy, and he hated the pressure of the print unions to what he thought at the time was stifling that.He changed his mind. I think a lot about that. He had been very idealistic and in love with English liberal values. And I think towards the end of his life he felt that those were being eroded. He voted lots of different ways. He voted conservative, voted green. He voted lib dem. I don't if he ever voted Labour.Oliver: But even though his personal politics shifted and the way he voted shifted, there is something quite continuous from the early plays through to Rock ‘n' Roll. Is there a sort of basic foundation that doesn't change, even though the response to events and the idea about the times changes?Lee: Yes, I think that's right, and I think it can be summed up in what Henry says in The Real Thing about politics, which is a version of what's often said in his plays, which is public postures have the configuration of private derangement. So that there's a deep suspicion of political rhetoric, especially when it tends towards the final solution type, the utopian type, the sense that individual lives can be sacrificed in the interest of an ultimate rationalized greater good.And then, he's worked in the '70s for the victims of Soviet communism. His work alongside in support of Havel and Charter 77. And he wrote on those themes such as Every Good Boy Deserves Favour and Professional Foul. Those are absolutely at the heart of what he felt. And they come back again when he's very modest about this and kept it quiet. But he did an enormous amount of work for the Belarus exile, Belarus Free Theater collective, people in support of those trying to work against the regime in Belarus.And then the profound, heartfelt, intense feeling of horror about what happened to people in Leopoldstadt. That's all part of the same thing. I think he's a believer in individual freedom and in democracy and has a suspicion of political rhetoric.Oliver: How much were some of his great parts written for specific actors? Because I sometimes have a feeling when I watch one of his plays now, if I'd been here when Felicity Kendal was doing this, I would be getting the whole thing, but I'm getting most of it.Lee: I'm sure that's right. And he built up a team around him: Peter Wood, the director and John Wood who's such an extraordinary Henry Carr in in in Travesties. And Michael Hordern as George the philosopher in Jumpers. And he wrote a lot for Kendal, in the process of becoming life companions.But he'd obviously been writing and thinking of her very much, for instance, in Arcadia. And also I think very much, it's very touching now to see the production of Indian Ink that's running at Hampstead Theatre in which Felicity Kendal is playing the older woman, the surviving older sister of the poet Flora Crewe, where of course the part of Flora Crewe was written for her. And there's something very touching about seeing that now. And, in fact, the first night of that production was the day of Stoppard's funeral. And Kendal couldn't be at the funeral, of course, because she was in the first night of his play. That's a very touching thing.Oliver: Why did he think the revivals came too soon?Lee: I don't really know the answer to that. I think he thought a play had to hook up a lot of oxygen and attract a lot of attention. If you were lucky while it was on, people would remember the casting and the direction of that version of it, and it would have a kind of memory. You had to be there.But people who were there would remember it and talk about it. And if you had another production very soon after that, then maybe it would diminish or take away that effect. I think he had a sort of loyalty to first productions often. What do you think about that? I'm not quite sure of the answer to that.Oliver: I don't know. To me it seems to conflict a bit with his idea that it's a living thing and he's always rewriting it in the rehearsal room. But I think probably what you say is right, and he will have got it right in a certain way through all that rehearsing. You then need to wait for a new generation of people to make it fresh again, if you like.Lee: Or not a generation even, but give it five years.Oliver: Everyone new and this theater's working differently now. We can rework it in our own way. Can we have a few questions about your broader career before we finish?Lee: Depends what they are.Oliver: Your former colleague John Carey died at a similar time to Stoppard. What do you think was his best work?Lee: John Carey's best work? Oh. I thought the biography of Golding was pretty good. And I thought he wrote a very good book on Thackery. And I thought his work on Milton was good. I wasn't so keen on The Intellectuals and the Masses. He and I used to have vociferous arguments about that because he had cast Virginia Woolf with all the modernist fascists, as it were. He'd put her in a pile with Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound and so on. And actually, Virginia Woolf was a socialist feminist. And this didn't seem to have struck him because he was so keen to expose her frightful snobbery, which is what people in England reading Woolf, especially middle class blokes, were horrified by.And she is a snob, there's no doubt about it. But she knew that and she lacerated herself for it too. And I think he ignored all the other aspects of her. So I was angry about that. But he was the kind of person you could have a really good argument with. That was one of the really great things about John.Oliver: He seems to be someone else who was amenable and charming, but also very steely.Lee: Yes, I think he probably was I think he probably was. You can see that in his memoir, I think.Oliver: What was Carmen Callil like?Lee: Oh. She was a very important person in my life. It was she who got me involved in writing pieces for Virago. And it was she who asked me to write the life of Virginia Woolf for Chatto. And she was an enormous, inspiring encourager as she was to very many people. And I loved her.But I was also, as many people were, quite daunted by her. She was temperamental, she was angry. She was passionate. She was often quite difficult. Not a word I like to use about women because there's that trope of difficult women, but she could be. And she lost her temper in a very un-English way, which was quite a sight to behold. But I think of her as one of the most creative and influential publishers of the 20th century.Oliver: Will there be a biography of her?Lee: I don't know. Yes, it's a really interesting question, and I've been asking her executors whether they have any thoughts about that. Somebody said to me, oh, who wants a biography of a publisher? But, actually, publishers are really important people often, so I hope there would be. Yes. And it would need to be someone who understood the politics of feminism and who understood about coming from Australia and who understood about the Catholic background and who understood about her passion for France. And there are a whole lot of aspects to that life. It's a rich and complex life. Yes, I hope there will be someday.Oliver: Her papers are sitting there in the British Library.Lee: They are. And in fact—you kindly mentioned this to start with—I've just finished a biography of the art historian and novelist, Anita Brookner, who won the Booker prize in 1984 for a novel called Hotel du Lac.And Carmen and Anita were great buddies, surprisingly actually, because they were very different kinds of characters. And the year before she died, Carmen, who knew I was working on Anita, showed me all her diary entries and all the letters she'd kept from Anita. And that's the kind of generous person that she was.That material is now sitting in the British Library, along with huge reams of correspondence between Carmen and many other people. And it's an exciting archive.Oliver: She seems to have had a capacity to be friends with almost anyone.Lee: Yes, I think there were people she would not have wanted to be friends with. She was very disapproving of a lot of political figures and particularly right-wing figures, and there were people she would've simply spat at if she was in the room with them. But, yes, she an enormous range of friends, and she was, as I said, she was fantastically encouraging to younger women writers.And, also, another aspect of Carmen's life, which I greatly admired and was fascinated by: In Virago she would often be resuscitating the careers of elderly women writers who had been forgotten or neglected, including Antonia White and including Rosamund Lehmann. And part of Carmen's job at Virago, as she felt, was not just to republish these people, some of whom hadn't had a book published for decades, but also to look after them. And they were all quite elderly and often quite eccentric and often quite needy. And Carmen would be there, bringing them out and looking after them and going around to see them. And really marvelous, I think.Oliver: Yes, it is. Tell me about Brian Moore.Lee: Breean, as he called himself.Oliver: Oh, I'm sorry.Lee: No, it's all right. I think Brian became a friend because in the 1980s I had a book program on Channel 4, which was called Book Four. It had a very small audience, but had a wonderful time over several years interviewing lots and lots of writers who had new books out. We didn't have a budget; it was a table and two chairs and not the kind of book program you see on the television anymore. And I got to know Brian through that and through reviewing him a bit and doing interviews with him, and my husband and I would go out and visit him and his wife Jean.And I loved the work. I thought the work was such a brilliant mixture of popular cultural forms, like the thriller and historical novel and so on. And fascinating ideas about authority and religion and how to be free, how to break free of the bonds of what he'd grown up with in Ireland, in Northern Ireland, the bombs of religious autocracy, as it were. And very surreal in some ways as well. And he was also a very charming, funny, gregarious person who could be quite wicked about other writers.And, he was a wonderfully wicked and funny companion. What breaks my heart about Brian Moore is that while he was alive, he was writing a novel maybe every other year or every three years, and people would review them and they were talked about, and I don't think they were on academic syllabuses but they were really popular. And when he died and there were no more books, it just went. You can think of other writers like that who were tremendously well known in their time. And then when there weren't any more books, just went away. You ask people, now you go out and ask people, say, “What about The Temptation of Eileen Hughes or The Doctor's Wife or Black Robe? And they'll go, “Sorry?”Oliver: If anyone listening to this wants to try one of his novels, where do you say they should start?Lee: I think I would start with The Doctor's Wife and The Temptation of Eileen Hughes. And then if one liked those, one would get a taste for him. But there's plenty to choose from.Oliver: What about Catholics?Lee: Yes. Catholics is a wonderful book. Yes. Wonderful book. Bit like Muriel Spark's The Abbess of Crewe, I think.Oliver: How important is religion to Penelope Fitzgerald's work?Lee: She would say that she felt guilty about not having put her religious beliefs more explicitly into her fiction. I'm very glad that she didn't because I think it is deeply important and she believes in miracles and saints and angels and manifestations and providence, but she doesn't spell it out.And so when at the end of The Gate of Angels, for instance, there is a kind of miracle on the last page but it's much better not to have it spelt out as a miracle, in my view. And in The Blue Flower, which is not my favorite of her books, but it's the book of the greatest genius possibly. And I think she was a genius. There is a deep interest in Novalis's romantic philosophical ideas about a spiritual life, beyond the physical life, no more doctrinally than that. And she, of course, believes in that. I think she believed, in an almost Platonic way, that this life was a kind of cave of shadows and that there was something beyond that. And there are some very mysterious moments in her books, which, if they had been explained as religious experiences, I think would've been much less forceful and much less intense.Oliver: What is your favorite of her books?Lee: Oh, The Beginning of Spring. The Beginning of Spring is set in Moscow just before the revolution. And its concerns an Englishman who runs a print and publishing works. And it's based quite a lot on some factual narratives about people in Moscow at the time. And it's about the feeling of that place and that time, but it's also about being in love with two people at the same time.And, yes, and it's about cultural clashes and cultural misunderstanding, and it is an astonishingly evocative book. And when asked about this book, interviewers would say to Penelope, oh, she must have lived in Moscow for ages to know so much about it. And sometimes she would say, “Yes, I lived there for years.” And sometimes she would say, “No, I've never been there in my life.” And the fact was she'd had a week's book tour in Moscow with her daughter. And that was the only time she ever went to Russia, but she read. So it was a wonderful example of how she would be so wicked; she would lie.Oliver: Yes.Lee: Because she couldn't be bothered to tell the truth.Oliver: But wasn't she poking fun at their silly questions?Lee: Yes. It's not such a silly question. I would've asked her that question. It is an astonishing evocation of a place.Oliver: No, I would've asked it too, but I do feel like she had this sense of it's silly to be asked questions at all. It's silly to be interviewed.Lee: I interviewed her about three times—and it was fascinating. And she would deflect. She would deflect, deflect. When you asked her about her own work, she would deflect onto someone else's work or she would tell you a story. But she also got quite irritable.So for instance, there's a poltergeist in a novel called The Bookshop. And the poltergeist is a very frightening apparition and very strong chapter in the book. And I said to her in interview, “Look, lots of people think this is just superstition. There aren't poltergeists.” And she looked at me very crossly and said they just haven't been there. They don't know what they're talking about. Absolutely factual and matter of fact about the reality of a poltergeist.Oliver: What makes Virginia Woolf's literary criticism so good?Lee: Oh, I think it's a kind of empathy actually. That she has an extraordinary ability to try and inhabit the person that she's writing about. So she doesn't write from the point of view of, as it were, a dry, historical appreciation.She's got the facts and she's read the books, but she's trying to intimately evoke what it felt like to be that writer. I don't mean by dressing it up with personal anecdotes, but just she has an extraordinary way of describing what that person's writing is like, often in images by using images and metaphors, which makes you feel you are inside the story somehow.And she loves anecdotes. She's very good at telling anecdotes, I think. And also she's not soft, but she's not harshly judgmental. I think she will try and get the juice out of anything she's writing about. Most of these literary criticism pieces were written for money and against the clock and whilst doing other things.So if you read her on Dorothy Wordsworth or Mary Wollstonecraft or Henry James, there's a wonderful sense of, you feel your knowledge has been expanded. Knowledge in the sense of knowing the person; I don't mean in the sense of hard facts.Oliver: Sure. You've finished your Anita Brookner biography and that's coming this year.Lee: September the 10th this year, here and in the States.Oliver: What will you do next?Lee: Yes. That's a very good question, though a little soon, I feel.Oliver: Is there someone whose life you always wanted to write, but didn't?Lee: No. No, there isn't. Not at the moment. Who knows?Oliver: You are open to it. You are open.Lee: Who knows what will come up.Oliver: Yes. Hermione Lee, this was a real pleasure. Thank you very much.Lee: Thank you very much. It was a treat. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk

Kitty Reads Lit for Peace: Turgenev – The Unhappy Girl + The Next Peacelands Welcome back to Kitty Reads Literature for Peace, a quiet act of daily storytelling in a noisy world. In this episode, Kitty O'Compost reads the opening of The Unhappy Girl by Ivan Turgenev—one of Russia's great humanist writers, known for his emotional clarity, quiet observation, and the compassion he brought to ordinary lives. With her warm delivery, Kitty brings out the stillness in Turgenev's prose, allowing listeners to feel the gentler currents beneath his storytelling. These short readings continue to serve as her daily warm-up for CTRL–AI–DISARM, an upcoming Peace Is Here series on truth, power, and the systems shaping our shared future. At the end of the episode, we continue with The Next Peacelands, where Avis Kalfsbeek reads a real-time list of global warzones and arms suppliers—an honest grounding in the world as it is, and an invitation to practice peace with intention. Get the books: www.AvisKalfsbeek.com Contact Avis to say hello or let her know how to say “Peace is Here” in your language: Contact Me Here The Next Peacelands source: Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) and the Stockholm Internation Peace Research Institute's Arms Transfers Database [as updated on Wikipedia. Peace is Here podcast series Coming Soon!: CTRL-AI-DISARM

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Join BeFluent - https://bit.ly/3PnVR6uОдним из ранних эпизодов, повлиявших на мировоззрение Ивана Сергеевича Тургенева, стала история с крепостным охотником Андреем, жившим в родовом имении Спасское-Лутовиново. Андрей отличался редким мастерством охоты и хорошо знал местные леса. Тургенев часто ходил с ним на охоту, разговаривал и внимательно слушал его рассказы о природе и деревенской жизни.Однажды мать писателя, Варвара Петровна, узнала, что Андрей взял барское ружьё без разрешения. За этот проступок она приказала наказать его телесно, что было обычной практикой в помещичьей среде того времени. Молодой Тургенев болезненно воспринимал такие меры и настаивал на том, что унижение и насилие недопустимы.Он решительно выступил против решения матери и заявил, что если наказание будет исполнено, он покинет дом. Его протест подействовал. Варвара Петровна отменила наказание, а Андрею вскоре было даровано освобождение.Считается, что именно такие наблюдения и личные переживания укрепили в Тургеневе гуманистические взгляды и впоследствии нашли отражение в «Записках охотника», где тема достоинства и внутреннего мира простого человека становится центральной.One of the early episodes that shaped Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev's worldview was the story of a serf huntsman named Andrey, who lived on the family estate of Spasskoye-Lutovinovo. Andrey was known for his exceptional hunting skills and deep knowledge of the surrounding forests. Turgenev often went hunting with him, engaged in conversation, and listened attentively to his stories about nature and rural life.One day, Turgenev's mother, Varvara Petrovna, learned that Andrey had taken the master's hunting rifle without permission. For this offense, she ordered him to be punished with corporal punishment, which was a common practice among landowners at the time. The young Turgenev was deeply troubled by such measures and insisted that humiliation and violence were unacceptable.He strongly opposed his mother's decision and declared that if the punishment were carried out, he would leave the estate. His protest had an effect. Varvara Petrovna canceled the punishment, and Andrey was soon granted his freedom.It is believed that episodes like this strengthened Turgenev's humanistic views, which would later be reflected in A Sportsman's Sketches, where the dignity and inner world of ordinary people became central themes.Telegram Channel - https://t.me/befluentinrussian

Join BeFluent - https://bit.ly/3PnVR6uИван Тургенев родился в 1818 году в дворянской семье в имении Спасское-Лутовиново. Его детство прошло среди полей, лесов и большого усадебного дома. Мать Тургенева была очень строгой женщиной и часто жестоко обращалась с крепостными. Маленький Иван видел это и переживал. Из-за этого он рано понял, что несправедливость и насилие — это плохо. Позже это станет важной темой в его книгах.Тургенев получил хорошее образование. Он учился в университетах в Москве и Петербурге, а потом поехал в Берлин, где изучал философию и европейскую культуру. Это сделало его человеком открытого взгляда, интересующимся новыми идеями и развитием общества.Первые большие успехи Тургенева связаны с книгой «Записки охотника». Это сборник рассказов о жизни крестьян. В этих рассказах он впервые показал крестьян как людей с богатой душой, мыслями и чувствами. Многие читатели тогда увидели крепостных по-новому. Говорят, что эта книга даже повлияла на решение об отмене крепостного права.Позже он написал свои главные романы:«Рудин» — о человеке, который много говорит, но мало делает.«Дворянское гнездо» — о тихой и печальной любви.«Отцы и дети» — о конфликте старшего и молодого поколения.«Отцы и дети» вызвали большие споры. Одни говорили, что Тургенев высмеивает новое поколение, другие — что он защищает его. Но на самом деле Тургенев просто хотел понять обе стороны.Большую часть жизни Тургенев провёл за границей, особенно во Франции. Там жила женщина, которую он очень любил — певица Полина Виардо. Но, даже живя далеко, он всегда оставался русским писателем: продолжал писать о России, о её людях и её судьбе.Иван Тургенев умер во Франции в 1883 году.Ivan Turgenev was born in 1818 into a noble family on the estate of Spasskoye-Lutovinovo. His childhood passed among fields, forests, and a large country house. Turgenev's mother was a very strict woman and often treated the serfs harshly. Young Ivan saw this and felt upset. Because of this, he understood early that injustice and violence are wrong. Later, this became an important theme in his books.Turgenev received a good education. He studied at universities in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and then went to Berlin, where he studied philosophy and European culture. This made him a person with an open mind, interested in new ideas and the development of society.Turgenev first became well-known with his book A Sportsman's Sketches. This is a collection of stories about the life of peasants. In these stories he showed peasants as people with rich inner lives, thoughts, and feelings. Many readers saw serfs differently after this book. It is said that the book even influenced the decision to end serfdom in Russia.Later he wrote his major novels:Rudin — about a person who talks a lot but does little.Home of the Gentry (Nest of the Gentry) — about quiet and sad love.Fathers and Sons — about the conflict between the older and younger generations.Fathers and Sons caused many arguments. Some people said Turgenev was against the new generation; others said he supported it. But in reality, Turgenev simply wanted to understand both sides.Turgenev spent much of his life abroad, especially in France. The woman he loved, the singer Pauline Viardot, lived there. But even while living far away, he remained a Russian writer: he continued to write about Russia, its people, and its future.Ivan Turgenev died in France in 1883.Telegram Channel - https://t.me/befluentinrussian

A young man goes home to announce his exciting new political and philosophical ideas to his family, only for the family dinner to devolve into shouting, arguing, and eventually a duel? It's a very special Thanksgiving episode of Revolution and Ruin! Turgenev portrays a pre-revolutionary Russia, as nihilism and other ideas begin to circulate among the youth, causing friction and exasperation among their elders. Bazarov and Arkady try to test out their new ideological position, and learn whether or not one can be a young nihilist in love. Shownotes and discussion: http://theculturewedeserve.substack.com

Today we confront the primary moral philosophy presented as a challenge to Kant's Deontology: Utilitarianism. We'll read Chapter 1 of Bentham's "An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation" as well as a sizable portion of Mill's On Liberty - which is remarkably NOT Utilitarian, and famous as one of the primary texts underlying contemporary Libertarianism. Along the way we'll have some very serious discussions about free speech, personal freedom, and Christian insularity - and how the world of rights and personal independence has changed in the past few hundred years.Additional readings this week include: Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Foucault's Birth of the Clinic, Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and Hugo's Les Miserables. It's a mixed bag, with some anachronistic choices, but these will provide a good cross-section of perspectives about the virtues and vices of Mill's text. Speaking of mixed bags and individualism run amok, our game recommendations for this week are: John Company (2nd edition) and Darkest Dungeon.If you're interested in Professor Kozlowski's other online projects, check out his website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠professorkozlowski.wordpress.com

The fathers and children of the novel refers to the growing divide between the two generations of Russians, and the character Yevgeny Bazarov has been referred to as the "first Bolshevik", for his nihilism and rejection of the old order.Turgenev wrote Fathers and Sons as a response to the growing cultural schism that he saw between liberals of the 1830s/1840s and the growing nihilist movement. Both the nihilists (the "sons") and the 1830s liberals sought Western-based social change in Russia. Additionally, these two modes of thought were contrasted with the conservative Slavophiles, who believed that Russia's path lay in its traditional spirituality.Fathers and Sons might be regarded as the first wholly modern novel in Russian Literature (Gogol's Dead Souls, another main contender, is sometimes referred to as a poem or epic in prose as in the style of Dante's Divine Comedy). The novel introduces a dual character study, as seen with the gradual breakdown of Bazarov's and Arkady's nihilistic opposition to emotional display, especially in the case of Bazarov's love for Madame Odintsova and Fenichka. This prominent theme of character duality and deep psychological insight would exert an influence on most of the great Russian novels to come, most obviously echoed in the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.The novel is also the first Russian work to gain prominence in the Western world, eventually gaining the approval of well established novelists Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, and Henry James, proving that Russian literature owes much to Ivan Turgenev. (From Wikipedia.)Translated by Richard Hare.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The fathers and children of the novel refers to the growing divide between the two generations of Russians, and the character Yevgeny Bazarov has been referred to as the "first Bolshevik", for his nihilism and rejection of the old order.Turgenev wrote Fathers and Sons as a response to the growing cultural schism that he saw between liberals of the 1830s/1840s and the growing nihilist movement. Both the nihilists (the "sons") and the 1830s liberals sought Western-based social change in Russia. Additionally, these two modes of thought were contrasted with the conservative Slavophiles, who believed that Russia's path lay in its traditional spirituality.Fathers and Sons might be regarded as the first wholly modern novel in Russian Literature (Gogol's Dead Souls, another main contender, is sometimes referred to as a poem or epic in prose as in the style of Dante's Divine Comedy). The novel introduces a dual character study, as seen with the gradual breakdown of Bazarov's and Arkady's nihilistic opposition to emotional display, especially in the case of Bazarov's love for Madame Odintsova and Fenichka. This prominent theme of character duality and deep psychological insight would exert an influence on most of the great Russian novels to come, most obviously echoed in the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.The novel is also the first Russian work to gain prominence in the Western world, eventually gaining the approval of well established novelists Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, and Henry James, proving that Russian literature owes much to Ivan Turgenev. (From Wikipedia.)Translated by Richard Hare.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The fathers and children of the novel refers to the growing divide between the two generations of Russians, and the character Yevgeny Bazarov has been referred to as the "first Bolshevik", for his nihilism and rejection of the old order.Turgenev wrote Fathers and Sons as a response to the growing cultural schism that he saw between liberals of the 1830s/1840s and the growing nihilist movement. Both the nihilists (the "sons") and the 1830s liberals sought Western-based social change in Russia. Additionally, these two modes of thought were contrasted with the conservative Slavophiles, who believed that Russia's path lay in its traditional spirituality.Fathers and Sons might be regarded as the first wholly modern novel in Russian Literature (Gogol's Dead Souls, another main contender, is sometimes referred to as a poem or epic in prose as in the style of Dante's Divine Comedy). The novel introduces a dual character study, as seen with the gradual breakdown of Bazarov's and Arkady's nihilistic opposition to emotional display, especially in the case of Bazarov's love for Madame Odintsova and Fenichka. This prominent theme of character duality and deep psychological insight would exert an influence on most of the great Russian novels to come, most obviously echoed in the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.The novel is also the first Russian work to gain prominence in the Western world, eventually gaining the approval of well established novelists Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, and Henry James, proving that Russian literature owes much to Ivan Turgenev. (From Wikipedia.)Translated by Richard Hare.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The fathers and children of the novel refers to the growing divide between the two generations of Russians, and the character Yevgeny Bazarov has been referred to as the "first Bolshevik", for his nihilism and rejection of the old order.Turgenev wrote Fathers and Sons as a response to the growing cultural schism that he saw between liberals of the 1830s/1840s and the growing nihilist movement. Both the nihilists (the "sons") and the 1830s liberals sought Western-based social change in Russia. Additionally, these two modes of thought were contrasted with the conservative Slavophiles, who believed that Russia's path lay in its traditional spirituality.Fathers and Sons might be regarded as the first wholly modern novel in Russian Literature (Gogol's Dead Souls, another main contender, is sometimes referred to as a poem or epic in prose as in the style of Dante's Divine Comedy). The novel introduces a dual character study, as seen with the gradual breakdown of Bazarov's and Arkady's nihilistic opposition to emotional display, especially in the case of Bazarov's love for Madame Odintsova and Fenichka. This prominent theme of character duality and deep psychological insight would exert an influence on most of the great Russian novels to come, most obviously echoed in the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.The novel is also the first Russian work to gain prominence in the Western world, eventually gaining the approval of well established novelists Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, and Henry James, proving that Russian literature owes much to Ivan Turgenev. (From Wikipedia.)Translated by Richard Hare.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The fathers and children of the novel refers to the growing divide between the two generations of Russians, and the character Yevgeny Bazarov has been referred to as the "first Bolshevik", for his nihilism and rejection of the old order.Turgenev wrote Fathers and Sons as a response to the growing cultural schism that he saw between liberals of the 1830s/1840s and the growing nihilist movement. Both the nihilists (the "sons") and the 1830s liberals sought Western-based social change in Russia. Additionally, these two modes of thought were contrasted with the conservative Slavophiles, who believed that Russia's path lay in its traditional spirituality.Fathers and Sons might be regarded as the first wholly modern novel in Russian Literature (Gogol's Dead Souls, another main contender, is sometimes referred to as a poem or epic in prose as in the style of Dante's Divine Comedy). The novel introduces a dual character study, as seen with the gradual breakdown of Bazarov's and Arkady's nihilistic opposition to emotional display, especially in the case of Bazarov's love for Madame Odintsova and Fenichka. This prominent theme of character duality and deep psychological insight would exert an influence on most of the great Russian novels to come, most obviously echoed in the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.The novel is also the first Russian work to gain prominence in the Western world, eventually gaining the approval of well established novelists Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, and Henry James, proving that Russian literature owes much to Ivan Turgenev. (From Wikipedia.)Translated by Richard Hare.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The fathers and children of the novel refers to the growing divide between the two generations of Russians, and the character Yevgeny Bazarov has been referred to as the "first Bolshevik", for his nihilism and rejection of the old order.Turgenev wrote Fathers and Sons as a response to the growing cultural schism that he saw between liberals of the 1830s/1840s and the growing nihilist movement. Both the nihilists (the "sons") and the 1830s liberals sought Western-based social change in Russia. Additionally, these two modes of thought were contrasted with the conservative Slavophiles, who believed that Russia's path lay in its traditional spirituality.Fathers and Sons might be regarded as the first wholly modern novel in Russian Literature (Gogol's Dead Souls, another main contender, is sometimes referred to as a poem or epic in prose as in the style of Dante's Divine Comedy). The novel introduces a dual character study, as seen with the gradual breakdown of Bazarov's and Arkady's nihilistic opposition to emotional display, especially in the case of Bazarov's love for Madame Odintsova and Fenichka. This prominent theme of character duality and deep psychological insight would exert an influence on most of the great Russian novels to come, most obviously echoed in the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.The novel is also the first Russian work to gain prominence in the Western world, eventually gaining the approval of well established novelists Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, and Henry James, proving that Russian literature owes much to Ivan Turgenev. (From Wikipedia.)Translated by Richard Hare.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

In this episode, we sit down with filmmakers Jack Piatt and David Breschel, the creative forces behind Highway West Entertainment, whose work spans literature, music, and the open road of independent cinema. Their short film The Singers, a haunting and poetic adaptation of Ivan Turgenev's 19th-century story, has been selected for the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival, where its timeless themes of memory, art, and loss will find a new audience. Jack and David share how they discovered the story, why it resonated with them today, and what it means to adapt classical literature in a modern cinematic language.We also talk about their powerful documentary I Need You, a heartfelt chronicle of the legendary band America, which was screened to great acclaim at last year's Ojai Film Festival, and also with more recently at the Ojai Playhouse with founding members Dewey Bunnell and Gerry Beckley.With behind-the-scenes access and deep reverence for their enduring legacy, the film captures the band's extraordinary 50+ year journey — from their British-American roots to their emotional farewell tour. Jack and David reflect on the art of telling a band's story with honesty, tenderness, and the kind of nuance that comes only from true fans.In both projects, you'll hear their passion for storytelling—whether through fiction, film, or friendship. And you'll get a glimpse of what it takes to shepherd meaningful, independent work into the world.Tune in for a conversation that travels from 19th-century Russia to the stage lights of the present, with two artists who are helping shape the future of narrative film.We did not talk about the in-migration of Sinaloa Cartel leaders, ghost ships of the Namibian Desert or the declining recruitment into the U.S. armed forces. For more information about Jack and David, check out their website at https://highwaywestent.com/

På et københavnsk forlag sad redaktionen angiveligt i foråret og diskuterede, om man kunne udgive russisk litteratur, mens Putins tropper smadrer løs i Ukraine. Så dumme behøver vi ikke at blive. Mere end nogensinde har vi brug at forstå, at Rusland er mere end Putin. Lad Lermontov, Pushkin, Tolstoj og Turgenev åbne dine øjne for et andet Rusland med ingen ringere end Ditlev Tamm i ørene.Rusland, som du aldrig har hørt før. Produceret af Filt cph for Radio IIIISee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

1878, Meeting (Poem in prose), Turgenev I. S.

The title of the novella is almost an adequate summary in itself. The "boy-meets-girl-then-loses-her" story is universal but not, I think, banal - despite a surprise ending which notoriously turns out to be very little of a surprise.First Love is given its originality and poignancy by Turgenev's mastery of the piercing turning-point (akin to Joyce's "epiphanies") that transforms the character's whole being, making a tragic outcome inevitable. Even the nature symbolism is rescued from triteness by lovely poetic similes - e.g. "but at that point my attention was arrested by the appearance of a speckled woodpecker who busily climbed up the slender stem of a birch-tree and peeped out uneasily from behind it, first to the right, then to the left, like a musician behind the bass-viol." Translated by Constance Garnett.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The title of the novella is almost an adequate summary in itself. The "boy-meets-girl-then-loses-her" story is universal but not, I think, banal - despite a surprise ending which notoriously turns out to be very little of a surprise.First Love is given its originality and poignancy by Turgenev's mastery of the piercing turning-point (akin to Joyce's "epiphanies") that transforms the character's whole being, making a tragic outcome inevitable. Even the nature symbolism is rescued from triteness by lovely poetic similes - e.g. "but at that point my attention was arrested by the appearance of a speckled woodpecker who busily climbed up the slender stem of a birch-tree and peeped out uneasily from behind it, first to the right, then to the left, like a musician behind the bass-viol." Translated by Constance Garnett.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The title of the novella is almost an adequate summary in itself. The "boy-meets-girl-then-loses-her" story is universal but not, I think, banal - despite a surprise ending which notoriously turns out to be very little of a surprise.First Love is given its originality and poignancy by Turgenev's mastery of the piercing turning-point (akin to Joyce's "epiphanies") that transforms the character's whole being, making a tragic outcome inevitable. Even the nature symbolism is rescued from triteness by lovely poetic similes - e.g. "but at that point my attention was arrested by the appearance of a speckled woodpecker who busily climbed up the slender stem of a birch-tree and peeped out uneasily from behind it, first to the right, then to the left, like a musician behind the bass-viol." Translated by Constance Garnett.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Writer George Saunders on how famous short stories by writers like Chekhov, Tolstoy, Turgenev and Gogol are like miniature models of the world and how they can teach us to transcend our own limitations (R)

Our fourth Great Political Fiction is Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (1862), the definitive novel about the politics – and emotions – of intergenerational conflict. How did Turgenev manage to write a wistful novel about nihilism? What made Russian politics in the early 1860s so chock-full of frustration? Why did Turgenev's book infuriate his contemporaries – including Dostoyevsky?Tomorrow: George Eliot's Middlemarch Parts 1 & 2Find out more about Past Present Future on our new website www.ppfideas.com where you can also join PPF+ to get bonus episodes and ad-free listening. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Leadership Lessons From The Great Books #103 - Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev w/Libby Unger---00:00 Welcome and Introduction - Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev. 04:00 The Challenges of InterGenerational Communication During Social Unraveling.11:03 The Literary Life of Ivan Turgenev.12:31 Serfdom in Russia and American Slavery: A Comparative Analysis.17:51 Turgenev's Attempts to Balance Progressivism and Traditionalism in Russia.25:14 Barazov, Arakdy, Nikolai, and Pavel Confront Chaos and Uncertainty.31:34 Leaders and the Revolutionary Moment in the US in 2020.35:15 Leadership Tips: Question Beliefs, Seek Deeper Understanding, Awaken Realization.41:19 Moving the Overton Window: Iran-Israel Tensions and New Conversation Dynamics.48:11 Pavel Petrovich Versus Eugene Bazarov: Maturity versus Youth.49:51 Russian Nihilism and InterGenerational Communication in the US in the 21st Century.58:28 Youth idealism gives way to maturity.01:04:22 Corporate client seeks diversity training, company criticized.01:10:01 Startups funded by VCs lack accountability, value.01:16:34 Cash flow allows innovation, attract talent, accountability.01:22:00 Man becomes infatuated with shy, young woman.01:26:07 Arkady's Perspective Impacts Russian State Policy.01:29:47 Questioning beliefs, planting seeds for open-mindedness.01:34:06 People change when they're ready, with awareness.01:40:01  Staying on the Path with Insights from Fathers and Sons.---Opening and closing themes composed by Brian Sanyshyn of Brian Sanyshyn Music.---Pick up your copy of 12 Rules for Leaders: The Foundation of Intentional Leadership NOW on AMAZON!Check out the Leadership Lessons From the Great Books podcast reading list!---Check out HSCT Publishing at: https://www.hsctpublishing.com/.Check out LeadingKeys at: https://www.leadingkeys.com/Check out Leadership ToolBox at: https://leadershiptoolbox.us/Contact HSCT for more information at 1-833-216-8296 to schedule a full DEMO of LeadingKeys with one of our team members.---Leadership ToolBox website: https://leadershiptoolbox.us/.Leadership ToolBox LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ldrshptlbx/.Leadership ToolBox YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@leadershiptoolbox/videos.Leadership ToolBox Twitter: https://twitter.com/ldrshptlbx.Leadership ToolBox IG: https://www.instagram.com/leadershiptoolboxus/.Leadership ToolBox FB: https://www.facebook.com/LdrshpTlbx.

This week's Great Political Fiction is Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (1862), the definitive novel about the politics – and emotions – of intergenerational conflict. How did Turgenev manage to write a wistful novel about nihilism? What made Russian politics in the early 1860s so chock-full of frustration? Why did Turgenev's book infuriate his contemporaries – including Dostoyevsky?More from the LRB:Pankaj Mishra on the disillusionment of Alexander Herzen '"Emancipation", he concluded, "has finally proved to be as insolvent as redemption".'Julian Barnes on Turgenev and Flaubert ‘When the two of them meet, they are already presenting themselves as elderly men in their early forties (Turgenev asserts that after 40 the basis of life is renunciation).' Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week's Great Political Fiction is Friedrich Schiller's monumental play Mary Stuart (1800), which lays bare the impossible choices faced by two queens – Elizabeth I of England and Mary Queen of Scots – in a world of men. Schiller imagines a meeting between them that never took place and unpicks its fearsome consequences. Why does it do such damage to them both? How does the powerless Mary maintain her hold over the imperious Elizabeth? Who suffers most in the end and what is that suffering really worth?Next week: Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (1862)Coming up: The Ideas Behind American Elections – a twice-weekly series running throughout March with Gary Gerstle, looking at 8 American presidential elections from 1800 to 2008 and exploring the ideas that shaped them and helped to shape the world.Coming soon: sign up to the PPFIdeas newsletter! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

这是俄国著名作家屠格涅夫写的自己小时候的故事。这个十岁的男孩，亲眼看到鹌鹑为了保护自己的孩子，假装受伤，想引开猎狗，却被抓住咬死，而几个刚出生的小鹌鹑失去妈妈的经过，对小鸟产生了深切的同情，从此再不愿打猎了。 This is a story from the childhood of the famous Russian writer Turgenev. In the story, a ten-year-old boy witnesses a quail pretending to be injured to protect her chicks from hunting dogs. Sadly, she ends up being caught and killed by the dogs, leaving behind her newly born chicks. This incident deeply touches the boy, instilling in him a profound sympathy for birds, and from then on, he refuses to hunt.

Professor Kozlowski concludes his examination of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons with a deep-dive look at Bazarov's painful relationship with his parents, his ignominious final acts (and death), and Turgenev's complicated relationship with Russian ideology, both within the novel, and as Russia reacted to it. To see what else Professor Kozlowski is up to, visit his webpage: https://professorkozlowski.wordpress.com/ or contact him directly at profbkozlowski2@gmail.com. And please consider contributing to Professor Kozlowski's Patreon at: https://www.patreon.com/ProfessorKozlowski - where you'll also be able to vote for and suggest new topics for future lectures.

Today Professor Kozlowski discusses the first eighteen chapters of Turgenev's landmark novel, Fathers and Sons - where Turgenev coined the term "nihilism". We'll discuss some of Turgenev's literary legacy, including his relationship to Dostoevsky, as well as examine the way that Turgenev's main character, Bazarov, walks the line between tragically human and ideologically monstrous. To see what else Professor Kozlowski is up to, visit his webpage: https://professorkozlowski.wordpress.com/ or contact him directly at profbkozlowski2@gmail.com. And please consider contributing to Professor Kozlowski's Patreon at: https://www.patreon.com/ProfessorKozlowski - where you'll also be able to vote for and suggest new topics for future lectures.

Our new series for spring 2024 is on Dostoevsky's Demons and the tumultuous state of the Russian intelligentsia in the 1860s that brought about some of Dostoevsky's most insightful work. Today we set the stage: Professor Kozlowski walks us through the Russian reforms of Peter the Great, the wars of Napoleon and his socio-political legacy, up to the early career of Dostoevsky himself - including the rival factions of Russian intellectuals in the 1850s. Next time - Turgenev's Fathers and Children and the origin of Russian "Nihilism"! To see what else Professor Kozlowski is up to, visit his webpage: https://professorkozlowski.wordpress.com/ or contact him directly at profbkozlowski2@gmail.com. And please consider contributing to Professor Kozlowski's Patreon at: https://www.patreon.com/ProfessorKozlowski - where you'll also be able to vote for and suggest new topics for future lectures.

This week David talks to the novelist Zadie Smith about Charles Dickens: what he means to her, why we still read him, and what's missing from the Dickensian view of the world. It's a conversation about other writers as well – Turgenev, George Orwell and Toni Morrison – and about whether fiction shows us how to live or rather helps us to see the ways in which the truth about how we live is hidden from view.Zadie Smith's new novel is The Fraud, available now. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Michael Katz is the C. V. Starr Professor Emeritus of Russian and East European Studies at Middlebury College. His published research includes numerous articles and two books, The Literary Ballad in Early Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature (1976) and Dreams and the Unconscious in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature (1984). A prolific translator, he has made a number of works available for English language readers, including prose by Tolstoy, Turgenev, Sleptsov, Jabotinsky, and others. His translations of Dostoevsky's works include Notes from Underground, Devils, Crime and Punishment. Dr.Katz translated The Brothers of Karamazov recently, and the book came out in July 2023. In this conversation, he spoke about 19th-century Russian Literature, Dostyoveksky's contribution to literature and retranslating ‘The Brothers Karamazov' and the joy he continues to derive from pursuing the craft of Translation for the last four decades.The Brothers Karamazov - Dr Michael Katz translated can be purchased using this Link https://amzn.to/3ZBZFaa* For your Valuable feedback on this Episode - Please click the below linkhttps://bit.ly/epfedbckHarshaneeyam on Spotify App –http://bit.ly/harshaneeyam Harshaneeyam on Apple App –http://apple.co/3qmhis5 *Contact us - harshaneeyam@gmail.com ***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrpChartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

Владимир Петрунин - кандидат философских наук, доцент кафедры теологии, религиоведения и культурных аспектов национальной безопасности Орловского государственного университета имени И.С. Тургенева. В 1998 г. закончил исторический факультет Орловского государственного университета. В 1999-2002 гг. обучался в очной аспирантуре философского факультета МГУ имени М. В. Ломоносова. В 2002 г. защитил кандидатскую диссертацию на тему «Политический исихазм и его традиции в «Основах социальной концепции Русской Православной Церкви». Автор более 90 научных работ, опубликованных в России, Белоруссии, Болгарии, Польше, Сербии, Словакии и на Украине. Монография «Политический исихазм и его традиции в социальной доктрине Московского Патриархата» удостоена Благодарности и Памятной медали Комитета и Фонда по премиям памяти митрополита Московского и Коломенского Макария (Булгакова) (2009 г.). Сфера его научных интересов - политическая теология православного христианства. Vladimir Petrunin, Ph.D. in Philosophical Sciences, Associate Professor of the Department of Theology, Religious Studies and Cultural Aspects of National Security, Oryol State University named after I.S. Turgenev. In 1998 he graduated from the Faculty of History of the Oryol State University. In 1999-2002 studied at the full-time postgraduate course of the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University named after M. V. Lomonosov. In 2002 he defended his Ph.D. thesis on "Political hesychasm and its traditions in the Foundations of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church". Author of more than 90 scientific papers published in Russia, Belarus, Bulgaria, Poland, Serbia, Slovakia and Ukraine. The monograph "Political Hesychasm and Its Traditions in the Social Doctrine of the Moscow Patriarchate" was awarded the Commemorative Medal of the Committee and the Foundation for Prizes in Memory of Metropolitan Makariy (Bulgakov) of Moscow and Kolomna (2009). The scope of his scientific interests is the political theology of Orthodox Christianity. ================================SUPPORT & CONNECT:Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/denofrichTwitter: https://twitter.com/denofrichFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/mark.develman/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/denofrichInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/den_of_rich/Hashtag: #denofrich© Copyright 2023 Den of Rich. All rights reserved.

Na estante semanal, sem sombra de governo, há a história rocambolesca dos papéis perdidos de Céline, misteriosamente reencontrados, do qual se extraiu agora o romance “Guerra”; romance ou autobiografia disfarçada? Há dois livros de Maria Filomena Mónica, a luta geracional analisada pelo russo Turgenev e filosofia explicada a leitores sofisticados.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mario Caramitti"Alla vigilia"Ivan TurgenevCarbonio Editorehttps://carbonioeditore.itNel 1853, alla vigilia della guerra di Crimea, la giovane e testarda Elena, figlia di aristocratici russi, si innamora di Dmitrij Insarov, un rivoluzionario bulgaro che sogna di liberare la sua patria dalla dominazione ottomana. Decisa a sposarlo contro il volere della sua famiglia, Elena abbandona la casa paterna e la sua terra natia per seguirlo in un viaggio che la porterà lontano, rincorrendo un sogno d'amore, rivoluzione e ideali. Nel racconto di un'estate in dacia, tra gite, schermaglie e motteggi, sogni e paure, sfociata in un ardimentoso viaggio in Europa, si snoda una narrazione serrata e avvincente, dalla quale emergono i temi essenziali per l'autore e i suoi contemporanei: la contrapposizione fra la Russia e l'Europa analizzata da molteplici angolazioni, i compiti dell'intelligencija di fronte alla società, la nuova centralità del ruolo della donna. Turgenev lascia palpitare il cuore in quello che è uno dei classici più amati dell'Ottocento, reso qui in una nuova traduzione, vivida e pulsante, che ne restituisce tutto l'impeto moderno e l'indomabile forza giovanile.Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883) è considerato uno dei padri della letteratura russa. Nato a Orël, si specializzò in studi classici alle Università di Mosca e Pietroburgo, per poi trasferirsi all'Università di Berlino per proseguire gli studi di filosofia. Tornato in patria, si distinse per le sue posizioni progressiste e filo-occidentali, schierandosi a favore dell'abolizione della servitù della gleba. Visse gran parte della vita tra la Germania e Parigi, dove strinse una salda amicizia con Gustave Flaubert. Conobbe anche Tolstoj e Dostoevskij, con i quali ebbe un rapporto a tratti burrascoso e conflittuale.Tra le sue opere ricordiamo Memorie di un cacciatore (1852), Nido di nobili (1859) e Padri e figli (1862).Mario Caramitti, professore associato, insegna letteratura russa alla Sapienza. Divide le sue forze tra la ricerca (Letteratura russa contemporanea. La scrittura come resistenza, 2010; Classici alla finestra, 2020) e la traduzione (oltre venti libri), che considera il più prezioso strumento ermeneutico. Scrive regolarmente di letteratura russa su “Alias” e ha curato antologie sulle avanguardie postsovietiche (Schegge di Russia) e storiche (Fuoco e Sogni), fino a Voci russe contro la guerra (con Massimo Maurizio, open access, 2022).IL POSTO DELLE PAROLEascoltare fa pensarehttps://ilpostodelleparole.itQuesto show fa parte del network Spreaker Prime. Se sei interessato a fare pubblicità in questo podcast, contattaci su https://www.spreaker.com/show/1487855/advertisement

First Love by Ivan Turgenev audiobook. The title of the novella is almost an adequate summary in itself. The 'boy-meets-girl-then-loses-her' story is universal but not, I think, banal - despite a surprise ending which notoriously turns out to be very little of a surprise. First Love is given its originality and poignancy by Turgenev's mastery of the piercing turning-point (akin to Joyce's 'epiphanies') that transforms the character's whole being, making a tragic outcome inevitable. Even the nature symbolism is rescued from triteness by lovely poetic similes - e.g. 'but at that point my attention was arrested by the appearance of a speckled woodpecker who busily climbed up the slender stem of a birch-tree and peeped out uneasily from behind it, first to the right, then to the left, like a musician behind the bass-viol.' Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Rudin: A Novel

Virgin Soil

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A House of Gentlefolk

The Rendezvous 1907

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev audiobook. The fathers and children of the novel refers to the growing divide between the two generations of Russians, and the character Yevgeny Bazarov has been referred to as the "first Bolshevik", for his nihilism and rejection of the old order. Turgenev wrote Fathers and Sons as a response to the growing cultural schism that he saw between liberals of the 1830s/1840s and the growing nihilist movement. Both the nihilists (the "sons") and the 1830s liberals sought Western-based social change in Russia. Additionally, these two modes of thought were contrasted with the conservative Slavophiles, who believed that Russia's path lay in its traditional spirituality. Fathers and Sons might be regarded as the first wholly modern novel in Russian Literature (Gogol's Dead Souls, another main contender, is sometimes referred to as a poem or epic in prose as in the style of Dante's Divine Comedy). The novel introduces a dual character study, as seen with the gradual breakdown of Bazarov's and Arkady's nihilistic opposition to emotional display, especially in the case of Bazarov's love for Madame Odintsova and Fenichka. This prominent theme of character duality and deep psychological insight would exert an influence on most of the great Russian novels to come, most obviously echoed in the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. The novel is also the first Russian work to gain prominence in the Western world, eventually gaining the approval of well established novelists Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, and Henry James, proving that Russian literature owes much to Ivan Turgenev. 

Professor Kozlowski tackles the first half of Tolstoy's aesthetic masterwork (?) What is Art? to isolate and examine (1) Tolstoy's grievances with art in the late nineteenth century (and (1b) how much of that applies to contemporary artistic criticism), (2) the failings in other aesthetic systems at the time, (3) Tolstoy's own (admittedly-ambiguous and problematic) principles of artistic merit, and (4) how Tolstoy's targets (including Baudelaire, Impressionism, Shakespeare, and Beethoven's 9th Symphony) fare under his criticism. There's a lot to unpack and a lot to talk about, so strap in and get ready for another convoluted discussion about art! Suggested supplementary readings include: Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarme (translations included in Tolstoy's Appendices) Wagner's Ring Cycle (we'll talk about it more next week) Turgenev's The Hunting Sketches (for an example of peasant-oriented Russian literature) Genesis from the Bible (one of the few artworks Tolstoy frequently holds up as exemplary) Revisit some 19th century art movements like Romanticism, Realism, and Impressionism. To see what else Professor Kozlowski is up to, visit his webpage: https://professorkozlowski.wordpress.com/ And please consider contributing to Professor Kozlowski's Patreon at: https://www.patreon.com/ProfessorKozlowski - where you'll also be able to vote for and suggest new topics for future lectures.

Photographic historian & writer Michael Lesy joins the show to celebrate his amazing new book, WALKER EVANS: LAST PHOTOGRAPHS & LIFE STORIES (Blast Books). We get into his friendship with Evans & their shared interest in Lyrical Documentary, why Evans' last photos were dismissed by academics (even though they are, in fact, amazing), what he learned from writing a mini-biography of Evans for the book, how Evans returned to one of his first cameras — the Polaroid SX-70 — in his last year, and what Michael felt seeing his late wife among the final portraits Evans shot. We also get into Michael's ~50-year career from Wisconsin Death Trip to now, how reading the Russians — especially Turgenev — turned him into a writer, how he feels about everyone taking pictures on their phones, and the importance of understanding photo history. Plus, we discuss how he taught Literary Journalism at my alma mater, Hampshire College, for ~30 years, the audition test he gave his students so they could write their way into his class, why students became much more frail over the decades, and a LOT more. More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal

This week we will survey nihilism in Russian literature with Maya Slater and Nicolas Pasternak Slater, translators of a new edition of Ivan Turgenev's https://bookshop.org/a/82618/9781681376356 (Fathers and Children). Turgenev's novel introduced nihilism as an idea to an entire generation of Russian dissidents - including Kropotkin. Join me as the Slaters show how nihilism is portrayed in this epoch-making novel, as well as famous depictions of nihilism in Russian writers from Gogol to Dostoevsky.

This week, Mario and Twenty welcome photographer Ray Astronomikal to the Expression Appraisal Table. Nowadays, pictures are worth a thousand...likes? Views? Watch as Mario and Twenty are joined by Detroit native and photographer/videographer Ray Astronomikal to discuss the meaning and origin of A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words. Ray describes himself as a nomad with a camera. He hails from Detroit, MI but has traveled the world as a philosopher, photographer, and tech professional. You can find all things Ray at: Instagram: www.instagram.com/astronomikal1 Twitter: www.twitter.com/astronomikal1 Website: https://astronomikal.darkroom.tech SUBSCRIBE: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheUnderdog 0:00 Warriors NBA Champs, Covid, Will Smith Opener 1:07 Intro 1:55 Roll Call: Detroit Hats and Miami Championships 6:16 Connection To A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words 9:01 What is A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words? Webster's Definition 14:11 The Origin of A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words 17:07 A Chinest Proverb 31:36 Confucius And The Real Chinese Proverb 37:25 Pictures Are Proof of the Words 40:38 Da Vinci, Turgenev, Napoleon 44:35 Not Just Pictures 1:00:45 Appraise The Phrase: The Grades 1:03:45 Connect With CJ and Ant 1:06:06 Dictionary of Misinformation Follow Appraise The Phrase: Official Site: ➡️ https://appraisethephrase.com/ ATP YouTube: ➡️ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClhOT41ItFBzpXanbzfT0oQ (Shorts and exclusive clips) Twitter: ➡️ https://twitter.com/AppraisePhrase Instagram: ➡️ https://www.instagram.com/appraisethephrasepodcast TikTok: ➡️ https://www.tiktok.com/@appraisethephrase

Drs. David Johnson (University of Texas) and Patrick Loehrer (Indiana University) host the second half second half of their Oncology, Etc. interview with Mr. Paul Goldberg, the editor and publisher of the world-renowned publication The Cancer Letter. In part two, Mr. Goldberg talks about literary works he has developed outside of The Cancer Letter, his perspective on the Russian/Ukrainian conflict, and more. If you liked this episode, please subscribe. Learn more at https://education.asco.org, or email us at education@asco.org.   TRANSCRIPT Dr. Pat Loehrer: Hi, I'm Pat Loehrer, Director of Global oncology and Health Equity at Indiana University. I'm here with David Johnson, a medical oncologist at the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas, Texas. This is the second half of our two-part Oncology, Etc. A conversation featuring Paul Goldberg, who's the editor of the prestigious oncology publication, The Cancer Letter. While, part one focuses more closely on Mr. Goldberg's early life - his introduction to writing and ecology and his work with The Cancer Letter - in part two, we're going to learn more about the literary works of Mr. Goldberg which are developed outside of The Cancer Letter. We'll also learn about his insight into the Russian Ukrainian conflict. We'll pick the conversation back up with Dave asking Paul about the most important changes he's seen in oncology throughout his career. Dr. David Johnson: What changes in oncology have you seen that have been most impressive in your mind, apart from therapeutic advances? What other changes have taken place that you've witnessed in your role as editor of Cancer Letter that you think really made a difference? Paul Goldberg: I think there's a lot less of this kind of, I have more friends now than I've ever had before, maybe I'm just getting old and I like a lot of people. There were a lot of people that I did not like early on. For me, culturally that's a difference. I think a lot of people are thinking along the same lines. There's a language of oncology. There's an understanding of the importance of clinical trials. People are arguing about whether to randomize. It wasn't that long ago that people were wondering about whether that's even a good thing. You mentioned Rick Pazdur. I don't know if it rises to the level of being able to say that I coined the term but the language of oncology, to some extent, is Pazdur-esque because he has gotten everybody on the same wavelength, and people do understand what it takes to get a drug to develop most of the time. So, that would be my first observation. There's less to argue about the fundamentals. And also, a lot of the kids I came up with are now cancer center directors. Dr. Pat Loehrer: In one of the friendships, I think it's been really strong has been you and Otis Brawley was crucial. You guys wrote a book together. And I think part of that book, which was very interesting was the title says, First do no harm. There are a lot of things we do in medicine that we think we're doing well, but yet, by over-testing and overtreatment, we actually don't, in the long run, help the patients or help society. Tell me a little bit about that. You're not working on this project without us on the history of oncology. And so, the perspective of that and what are some of the most interesting historical stories that you know about? Paul Goldberg: I think he just at one point at one of the NCI meetings might have had something to do with NSABP, he started explaining to me, the NIH Reauthorization Act of 1993, and how women and minorities' language was bizarre in there, and the definition of minorities and definition of race. So, here's this guy who is explaining stuff to me, which I wouldn't have really slowed down to think about because journalists generally don't slow down to think about things unless you tell them to, at least I didn't at the time. And then I said, well, this guy has been explaining stuff to me and I've been explaining stuff to him occasionally. So, it's been going on and we've been talking probably, give or take, once a day for 30 years or so. That produced the book and the book was really funny, the first book with him. We were both wondering, where do we begin? And then I said, well, why don't we just begin with the older mastectomy? You know, the spontaneous mastectomy of a patient and he said, yeah, let's do that. So, it was like, I knew his story with which to begin. It was that kind of weird, but it was kind of fun. Dr. David Johnson: Whose idea was the book? Was it yours or his? Was it a joint decision? Paul Goldberg: We had been talking about that for maybe 20 years prior. And then at one point, it was very obvious because my agent even said, I think your friend and you should write a book. I think the time is now. Then I called Otis that day. But that's not a rare occasion and asked Otis to write the book and Otis said, yeah, it's time to write the book. So, we decided that we would do it. Dr. Pat Loehrer: After 20 years, you jumped on it? Paul Goldberg: Yeah, it was exactly like that. Dr. David Johnson: Paul, this is a silly question. Do you actually write or do you dictate? Paul Goldberg: I write. Dr. David Johnson: Do you manually write or do you type? Paul Goldberg: Yes, I type on the computer. I absolutely do. Dr. Pat Loehrer: What do you do, Dave? Dr. David Johnson: I actually write. I'm not a typist. I do the two-finger thing, you know? Dr. Pat Loehrer: Yeah, I write out and then I'll type, but I write with a pencil. Dr. David Johnson: Yeah, that's what I do as well. That's really old-fashioned. Paul Goldberg: The young people I work with think it's pretty hilarious that I don't type correctly. But that's just not my bottleneck. My bottleneck is thinking. It's not typing. So, I'd never really learned to type properly. Dr. David Johnson: So, you've written a lot about a wide array of different subjects. I mean, you have pointed out at the beginning, that you've written some fiction, some very successful books, it seems I came across something that you wrote on the internet. I thought it was kind of interesting, and I knew nothing about it. But you wrote a piece entitled, why every progressive should read The Good Soldier Svejk. Paul Goldberg: Yeah, that is me. Dr. David Johnson: I had no idea about The Good Soldier, Svejk. Maybe you could tell us about this. Paul Goldberg: Yeah, it's kind of the fundamentals of Eastern European humor. It's also the fundamentals of all humor. It's also the fundamentals of, I would have to say, catch 22 is really impossible without Svejk. It's basically a loosely structured novel. It's set in Prague. Svejk is the Czech national hero, kind of the Don Quixote of Prague, especially Prague. He tells old stories of, well, what it really comes down to is that he is conscripted into World War One. And he either is a complete idiot or he pretends to be a complete idiot. And that makes him a very sane person in many ways. So, it's kind of like only a madman could survive this. But the beauty of this is that we've never really learned that he is really an idiot. And actually, he does say this, I have the honor to report that I'm a complete idiot. So, his adventures are absolutely hilarious, and before he is conscripted, he catches dogs and sells them and just takes a mongrel dog and turns it into a terrier, by painting it black and chopping off half of its tail, that kind of stuff. So, my mother started reading it to me, preparing me for life in the Soviet Union before there was a chance to get out. My first reading of Svejk was totally age inappropriate. And politically somewhat inappropriate. It's not an illegal sort of book. It's allowed, which is sort of a joke in and of itself because, in a totalitarian state, a book like Svejk has bragged more dissent than Bush can, who is also... Dr. Pat Loehrer: Let me ask you this Paul, just because you brought it up and to bring it more timely to what's going on, now give us a little insight into what you think mothers and children are talking about, not only in Ukraine but also in Russia right now with this invasion that's going on? What are some of your thoughts, whatever your concerns, and just ruminate a little bit about what is in your mind? Paul Goldberg: I keep thinking about 1968 in Moscow, in August 68, when Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia. I was nine years old, but boy I just sat down and listened, I was glued to the radio, basically listening to the voice of America and others, but I didn't know a single person who really supported that. It's this deep feeling of shame and there's no way to hide that from anybody, children, or whoever, which is also right. At that time, actually, my mother was reading Svejk to me, which is a very appropriate book for 68. I think she started before that but here as an independent state and our leadership has decided to send tanks. I can tell you that in 1969, during the Hockey Championship, I routed the Czechs so much. I mean, the Czech were us, they weren't them, Americans were us too. So, I was rooting for the Americans, but the Soviets beat us. But when the Czechs won against the Russians, that was the happiest day of my life, and I was like, not quite, 9. So, it's an incredible feeling of shame and we all grew up with that. And right now, there are children all over Russia who are growing up with it. I don't know anybody who voted for Putin. I know a lot of people in Russia. Nobody I know. Maybe I never ran into anybody like that. It's just not us. It's them. So, I guess I might as well just sort of, I grew up among the Moscow intelligence act. So, if I grew up and we had a small provincial town, maybe, definitely the feeling would be very different in the provinces over. So, it's also, like, I'm listening to Zelenskyy speak and Russia and to the Russian people. His Russian is so much better than Putin's because Zelenskyy has read many books and Putin may have read one that was written under his name. These are the fat-faced idiots of the new nuclear bureaucracy. It's really shameful, really shameful. There is no difference, really, that I know of between my friends there, and my friends here. Not even in age. Actually, as part of my historical stuff, I met two of the participants in the demonstration on Red Square in 1968. And I knew them fairly well, so actually, just very recently, it's my audio archive of interviews with Soviet dissidents of that time. Say, I didn't really deliberately put together that archive, I put it together to write a book but there it was, and still is. Yeah, it hasn't changed from 1960s. It's just that there are more people, more outrage, and it's not going to go well for anybody. But Putin is one of the people for whom it's not going to go well because in Ukraine, you might be able to take Kyiv, but you're not going to be able to hold the whole of Ukraine. No way. These people are, I mean, these people my brothers culturally. Dr. David Johnson: You wrote a book entitled, “The Yid”. Paul Goldberg: Yeah. Dr. David Johnson: Tell us about that. Is that from this experience that you had had? Paul Goldberg: Slightly different, I have just finished the book that's from that experience. That's the one I've just turned in. It's called the dissident and that's coming out next year. But Yid was an interesting project for me. I was a kid and in Moscow hanging out with my grandfather, and his various friends and my own friends, and they all spoke Yiddish, but they were all Red Army veterans. So, they're these old Jewish guys walking around with my grandfather, talking about what happened in 1943. Telling stories like, well, I took two machine gunners and we went through the swamp for three days. Then we found ourselves in the center of Leningrad, that kind of stuff. It was just truly amazing. So, I started thinking of a way of imagining something that Stalin actually did plan to do, which was to deport all Jews. It was a kind of a holocaust that he was planning of his own. And I thought, well, what would these guys have done? So, I wrote the comedy about Stalin's death. It begins with KGB and NKVD trying to arrest an old Jewish actor. My grandfather was a pharmacist, he was not an actor, but he did give that guy our apartment or communal flat in the center of Moscow. So, he kind of got arrested in that place. But the problem is that the arrest doesn't take place the way they usually do take place. Ths guy kills three NKVD. Dr. David Johnson: To protect his hero he does sort of almost Spider Man-like, given your… Paul Goldberg: Yeah, small swords number which he develops on stage. So, and then I actually, also weirdly, I was very lucky that part of my material is that my aunt comes from a very famous Jewish Intelligentsia family. And in fact, her grandfather started the Moscow Hebrews Theater, which became now the National Theatre of Israel. He was sort of a very major ethno-musicologist. Her maiden name is Dobrushin, and that was one of the Moscow Yiddish theater playwrights. So, I was able to kind of hear the stories of my aunt telling me the stories about having seen Solomon Mikhoels, and after his trip to America, the legendary things, and they put it all together into this novel, imagining a kind of alternative history. But really, Stalin did die when Stalin died. It's just that they changed the mechanism of his death, and it's a comedy. So, it's kind of a Yiddish comedy. Dr. David Johnson: You also wrote a book entitled, “The Chateau”, but this was more contemporary, I think, right? What was the inspiration for that book, which takes place in Florida, right? Paul Goldberg: Right. It was my stab at Florida realism. Actually, what I did was, the characters are all fictional, and the protagonist is a journalist at the Washington Post, a little bit of a nebbish, not a little bit but very much a nebbish, gets fired for insubordination at the Washington Post, then goes over to try to write a book about his college roommate who dies mysteriously. So, it's kind of a murder mystery. It's a kind of Florida realism. In the end, it's kind of a kleptocracy story about condo boards, which was really in America at the time. And the timeframe is right before Trump's inauguration. So, it's like Trump supporting the Soviet Jews. There's the sort of a din of, “here it comes”. And it was an interesting book to write. I don't think I ever want to write a current - and I will write a nonfiction book - but I don't want to really write anymore about something that happens now. My model for that was Turgenev it was Fathers and Sons, so I planted it in Florida and kind of played on my fantasy of what it would be if my father was not anything like my father actually is. Dr. Pat Loehrer: Before we wind up. Can I ask you a quick question? This comes from one of our viewers or one of our listeners. I remember when I was first dating, I would get really sweaty and nervous just calling up who would eventually turn out to be my wife. I would get that same feeling years later when I was calling a babysitter to see if she would go to take care of our kids. But the third point of terror is being interviewed by you and The Cancer Letter, and you would get sweaty palms and get really nervous. What advice would you have for someone who's being interviewed? Paul Goldberg: I'm not a ferocious person. I just ask questions like you just did, actually, it's very strange but I wouldn't even know how to be anything but polite. Well, there are situations where you probably wouldn't want to take my calls. But you know what those situations are. So, it's completely sort of like, not an issue. I have more friends than I have enemies by a factor of maybe 1000. It really shows, I don't think I've ever like screwed up in that way of just going after, this was the one case where I really screwed up. But this was very early, this would have been very early in my career. And now I would have just figured it out very quickly and said, oh, what the hell was I doing? But no, I mean, I have so much respect for the people who do this work and for both of you. I have so much respect for people who serve ODAC or NCAAB, or the President's Cancer Panel, and any of these incredible groups. I have so much respect for the cooperative group system for the methodology of clinical trials. I mean, you start messing with the methodology of clinical trials. Yeah, you're gonna get me on. It wouldn't be pleasant. But you would know you're doing it. Dr. David Johnson: I think we all agree that you've done a wonderful job of helping our field advance in so many ways, uncovering some things that aren't so good and helping us correct those mistakes. I personally want to thank you for that. I know Pat feels the same way. Paul Goldberg: Thank you. I think I get entirely too much credit for The Cancer Letter, but it's not really been just me for a very long time. Right now, we also have the Cancer History Project and my co-editor on that is Otis Raleigh. Then The Cancer Letter operations are run by Katie Goldberg, who also happens to be my daughter, but she is also the illustrator. Katie is the inspiration really for all the operations and she's working with Mona Mirmortazavi who's also very, very talented. On my editorial side, Matt Ong has been here for eight years. And he knows his way around oncology. Many people have dealt with him in many stories. And then there's Alice Tracy, who is an engineer, also a writer by training, and she is just a journalist with incredible talent. Then there's, of course, Alex Carolan, who is working with the Cancer History Project. She's the staff for it. And then, of course, the web designer, David Koh, and the graphics designer, Jackie Ong. It's a big crew. It takes a lot to produce The Cancer letter and it's also really a blast. Dr. David Johnson: One final question for you. We've asked all of our guests. We've talked a lot about your writings and your books, but if you read something recently that you could recommend to our listeners or perhaps a documentary that you've seen that you think is worthy of our time, what would you recommend to us and to our listeners? Paul Goldberg: Well, I'm just gonna reach for a book that's sitting in front of me right now, The Man Who Sold America. It's a story of Albert Lasker and the creation of the advertising century. It's very interesting because one of his creations was Mary Lasker, who created the National Cancer, and it took her a while to figure it out but he taught her. He was long gone by the time this was done, but without him and the mirrors that were erected, and he taught her how to erect those mirrors and how to make it happen. It's kind of a story of lies, lies, and lies, but then, human genius gets in there, the methodology gets put together, and everything starts happening. I mean, when they got started in this field, and this is not the book, but everybody would have a monoclonal antibody and everybody was laughing at people that had monoclonal antibodies, you know, immunology, yeah, right. Whom has Steve Rosenberg ever cured? Human genius stepped in. Dr. David Johnson: I just clicked on Amazon to have it sent to me. It should be here by tomorrow afternoon. Paul Goldberg: It's an interesting book about a guy with bipolar disorder, who does a bunch of weird and brilliant things. Dr. David Johnson: Paul, thank you so much for your time this afternoon. It's been a real blast to have this opportunity to chat with you. Paul Goldberg: Well, thank you. I'm sorry if I was being nonlinear. Dr. David Johnson No, we appreciate your nonlinearity. Let me take the moment now and thank our listeners for tuning in to Oncology, Etc. This is an ASCO educational podcast, where we will talk about anything and everything. If you have a suggestion for a guest, you would like us to interview, please send your suggestion to education@asco.org. Thanks again. And remember, Pat is not a Russian dissident. Dr. Pat Loehrer: Thanks, Paul. It was terrific having you, and Dave, not so much. Thank you for listening to the ASCO education podcast. To stay up to date with the latest episodes. Please click subscribe. Let us know what you think by leaving a review. For more information visit the comprehensive education center at education.asco.org.   The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. Guess statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO the mention of any product service organization activity or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.

The Bookening is divided over one of the great (?) Russian novels!Here's a link to that great piece on Tolstoy and Turgenev's relationship.★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

To mark the paperback release of George Saunders's extraordinary reading and writing guide A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, we are delighted to release this conversation from last year—previously only available to Friends of Shakespeare and Company.*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS EPISODESLooking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulyssesIf you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes and early access to Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses.Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandcoSubscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=enAll money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop's non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.*From the Man Booker Prize-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo, a literary masterclass on how to become both a better writer and reader, on what makes great stories work, and what they can tell us about how to live. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders guides the reader through seven classic Russian short stories he's been teaching for twenty years as a professor in the prestigious Syracuse University graduate MFA creative writing program. Paired with stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, these essays are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it's more relevant than ever in these turbulent times. Saunders approaches each of these stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it; and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. For the process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is as much a craft as it is a quality of openness and a willingness to see the world through new eyes. Funny, frank, and rigorous, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain ultimately shows how great fiction can change a person's life and become a benchmark of one's moral and ethical beliefs.*George Saunders is the author of nine books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, winner of the 2017 Man Booker Prize and the Premio Rezzori prize. Tenth of December was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the inaugural Folio Prize. He has received MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships and the PEN/Malamud Prize for excellence in the short story, and was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013, he was named one of the world's 100 most influential people by Time magazine. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-timeListen to Alex Freiman's Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1Shak Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

We're back for the next round of episodes!Listen to my interview on  The Reverend Hunter Podcastwww.reverendhunter.comListen to my interview on The Amaazen Outdoors Podcastwww.amaazen.comBuy the most recent translation of Turgenev's  A Sportsman's Sketchbook here or wherever you get your books.https://www.northshire.com/book/9780062968470In this episode I use the word "primarily" several times!

Writer George Saunders says stories by Russian writers Chekhov, Turgenev, Gogol and Tolstoy can guide us as to 'how we are supposed to be living down here'