In 1901 Russia’s Holy Synod excommunicates Count Lev Tolstoy for his “anti-Christian” and anti-church teachings. In the same year the first Nobel Prize innLiterature is awarded. Contrary to general expectation it was not awarded to Tolstoy but to the French poet Sully Prudhomm.
“A very good poet, novelist and philosopher, now somewhat forgotten. You should read him” - says Edvard Radzinsky.
Many writers, including August Strinberg and Henrik Ibsen protested. The prize was brand new and it was then taken seriously.
Radzinsky continues his talk about the year 1901:
“In Moscow Arts Theatre they first staged ‘Three Sisters”’. But do you know what thus play is about? In reality. No, of course, it’s true that there are three sisters, they recall the past etc…but no. No. It is a story about
the approaching brute, who will soon arrive in this country. It is about how this Natasha, embodiment of sheer brutishness, takes over the house of the Prozorovs. And how does it end? How does the third act end? Don’t you remember? A fire. A bell rings, somewhere far, and
the walls of this house a fire is burning… Yes, a writer, if he is a writer, is a prophet.”
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Radzinsky on the correspondence between Poland’s King Stephen Bathory and Ivan IV “The Terrible” (actually known as “The Tormentor” in the years following his rule) during the Livonian War.
“Difficult peace negotiations began. Batory demanded not only Livonia, but also Russian cities. The warring parties exchanged sarcastic letters.
Ivan informed Bathory that he, a natural Sovereign, received his throne as an inheritance from his forefathers, by the will of God, and not "by the consent of a multitude of rebellious crowds."
Yesterday I read (via Skype) for my 5 year old grandson, Stanisław Lem’s story “Trurl’s machine”. It’s from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyber… . The story is about how the constructor Trurl (one of the two heroes of these stories, the other being his friend,
Klapaucius) by accident constructed an enormous electronic thinking machine that turned out to be an electronic idiot. It possessed the three qualities of an idiot: it could not do arithmetic, it was very stubborn & insisted in the correctness of its
wrong answers(it thought that 2+2=7) and it was easily offended and ready to impose its (wrong) views by force. Having been repeatedly insulted by Trurl because of its stupidity, it rebelled and tried to crush the two constructors with its bulk. It managed to chase them into a
Below in this thread is my translation of a fragment of an interview with Edvard Radzinsky conducted by Andrij Pelchevski, a Ukrainian TV presenter, entrepreneur and politician (leader of a political party). The title of the interview is “From Dictatorship to Revolution”.
This fragment concerns Boris Yeltsin, and Radzinsky’s encounter with him. Earlier Radzinsky explained how he was studying Nicholas II’s diaries still deep in Soviet days, in the museum of the October revolution.
He said that the young woman who was working there and who brought him the diaries could not understand why he needed them. In order to be allowed to see the diary he wrote an application, in which he wrote that he was writing about
A curious thing about Polish opinion polls is that they generally ask about “trust” in politicians (hence headlines such as “majority of Poles do not trust” Tusk, Kaczyński etc). In Japan (and, I think, most other countries) polls usually ask about “support”, with “trust”
seen only as one element of “support” (questions about “trust” are much less common and almost invariably Japanese Prime Ministers enjoy the highest level of “trust” at the onset of their stay in office). In Poland it seems one generally “trusts” or “distrusts” politicians but
supports political parties. I have always wondered how many people actually support politicians they don’t trust. My impression was that in Japan it was the usual state of affairs, especially in the 80s and 90s, when practically every Prime Ministerial term ended in a scandal
Most of us have, to a greater or lesser extent, have had to learn during this epidemic some molecular biology and even it’s subset, microbiology. In my own case, in addition to Twitter I have a daughter who has a doctorate in molecular biology from embl.org/sites/heidelbe… and
who works as a scientist for one of America’s best known biotech companies (which, however, does not make vaccines or create dangerous chimeric viruses) so she would often tell me a lot about DNA, RNA, gene editing etc, but it all seemed too lacking in overall unity & especially
mathematical structures to stay in my head for long. So only once this covid thing started I began to acquaint (or reacquaint) myself with the basic concepts of the subject. And it seems to me now that, while it’s an enormously rich subject, which had made huge advances, it still
A well known anecdote about a Bolshevik monuments to Dostoevsky.
Shortly before the unveiling of the monument, Lunacharsky, being the People's Commissar of Education, found himself in Kiev on business.
Just at this time, an evening was held there for classmates of the Kiev gymnasium, in which Lunacharsky also studied. Graduates of this gymnasium, most of whom were hostile to the Bolshevik regime, castigated Lunacharsky:
“What are you Bolsheviks doing? Anatoly Vasilyevich, you are destroying churches, you are breaking monuments!”. “No, you are wrong, nothing of the kind. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin has just approved a plan for many monuments.