Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

Recently my girlfriend went through a rather extensive charade before handing back an unread novel which a colleague had insisted upon lending to her. After pronouncing the prose so overwrought as to be unreadable, she nevertheless spent the best part of an hour and a half reading synopses of the book’s plot and readers’ commentaries on various websites. Last I heard, she’d returned the volume to its owner, only after declaring her extreme surprise at one of its purportedly unlikely plot twists. Fair to say that the novel in question is not considered part of literature’s canon. And the embarrassment at abandoning its reading was not the humiliation of intellectual defeat. However, several newspapers this morning (possibly prompted by World Book Day ) comment on a survey which suggests many people lie and claim to have finished books which they have not actually read at all. ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’ came top, with 42% of respondents admitting that they had in the past 'misspoke...

It is not just in Britain that governments like to indulge in a spot of identity navel gazing. In Russia a Kremlin sponsored competition has been taking place in order to establish the ‘Eemya Rossiya’ or ‘Name of Russia’. The premise was that one name, popularly chosen, should emerge which peculiarly embodies Russia’s culture and history. It is the type of initiative which you might expect Liam Byrne to endorse as part of ‘Britain Day’. The Russian competition has been attended by controversy. Stalin was included in the initial long list of 500 names , suggested by the organisers. Indeed the Soviet dictator would have finished second in the poll, had he not been stripped of one million votes due to alleged vote rigging on the internet. Whether this can be ascribed to genuine vigilance on the part of the pollsters, or an attempt to sanitise an embarrassing verdict by the Russian people, the Georgian eventually finished twelfth, which in itself exposes Russia’s ambivalent attitude...

In Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace the character Pierre Bezukhov joins the Russian Freemasons. Bezukhov is seeking in masonry a mystical connection that can reconcile two prevailing Russian currents of thought, that of the Westernisers and that of the Slavophiles. The character naively expects the secrets of the craft to deliver some manner of revelatory self-knowledge. This expectation inevitably leads to disillusion as Pierre finds something which simply reflects the structures of Russian society in which he is already an unwilling participant. “Under the Masonic aprons and insignia he saw the uniforms and decorations at which they aimed in ordinary life.” Pierre’s disappointment is brought to mind by the Moscow Times’ article exploring freemasonry in Russia. During Soviet times freemasonry ceased to exist. It was one of the many independent organisations opposed by the Communist authorities. More recently Democratic Party presidential candidate Andrei Bogdanov provided a whiff ...