The uprising that inspired Hyperadamantine, though only a passing note in many Western histories of Russia, has had a remarkably long half-life for a so-called “failure.” The uprising led to something of a lost generation among Russian nobility: Some of the boldest and most liberal-minded aristocrats were exiled. They weren’t silenced, though: When the wave of…
Category: historical miscellany
A Novel History
“You’re a historian. Why write a novel?” a dear friend and early reader of Hyperadamantine wanted to know. Why indeed? Like many academics, in the course of looking for something else, I stumbled across the name Nikolai Bestuzhev a lot, as I researched culture and society in 19th– and 20th-century Buryatia for a dissertation. Just…
The most heavy metal description of Siberia’s Lake Baikal ever
Courtesy, but of course, of the incomparable Gavriil Batenkov: This is the initial sight Baikal presents the viewer in summer: grey battleships girded in dense fog float in the deep blue distance; the water’s mirror-smooth surface in still times and its frightening black waves in storms, which deafen with their roar and seem poised to…
The Idiot: My Russian TV Fail
It was a huge mistake to agree to be on Russian TV. I had many invitations extended to me when I worked as an editor of the opinion page at The Moscow Times, and most of them I accepted out of curiosity. But I should have politely declined when a producer for a certain talk…
t.newyear, novelist 