exile
The awful calamity of Stalin being a music lover
The dictator obsessed over new recordings and was a frequent visitor to the Bolshoi; but he treated even the greatest musicians arbitrarily, consigning many to the Gulag for no reason
Alexander Pushkin – Russia’s greatest letter-writer
Intimate, earthy and uninhibited, Pushkin’s letters, collected together, read like a novel and give an encyclopaedic view of 19th-century Russian life
The important business of idle loafing
Alain Corbin describes how rest, once seen as a prelude to eternal life, began to assume a therapeutic quality in the 19th century, as a guard against burnout and a cure for TB
Citizens of nowhere: This Strange Eventful History, by Claire Messud, reviewed
A fictionalised version of Messud’s recent family history traces the many moves of three generations forced into exile from Algeria
Lord Byron had many faults, but writing dull letters wasn’t one of them
Andrew Stauffer traces the poet’s tumultuous life through some of the most remarkable missives in the English language
Three men in exile: My Friends, by Hisham Matar, reviewed
Terror of discovery by the Libyan authorities haunts Khaled, Hosam and Mustafa after their protests against Gaddafi make their return home impossible
The Russian Proust
Yuri Felsen, born in St Petersburg, was an exile in Riga, Berlin and Paris and died at Auschwitz in 1943.…
Just a man: Demystifying Napoleon
Who says that the ‘great man’ theory of history is dead? Following hard on the heels of Andrew Roberts’s magnificent…
Voices of exile
During the military dictatorships of the 1970s, exile for many Latin American writers was not so much a state of…
Dante’s egomania
Unlike Shakespeare, who kept himself out of all his works, except the Sonnets, Dante was endlessly reworking his autobiography, even…
Fleeing Mother Russia
‘Ah! Scrubbing the deck! My childhood dream! As a child I had once seen a sailor hosing the deck with…
The wandering Jew
Stefan Zweig wasn’t, to be honest, a very good writer. This delicious fact was hugged to themselves by most of…
Salad days
The early 1990s in Russia were hungry years. At the time, I was a student, too idle to barter and…
