MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Dear readers!  I am just back from Tel Aviv, where I went to interview some important world literary-historical cats.  They are literally sitting on some invaluable manuscripts!  Neither they nor their caretakers (the daughters of Max Brod’s late secretary) have been especially forthcoming to the press.  But that didn’t stop me and my colleague Avi Steinberg from creepily lurking around their front yard for like an hour.

Because I am a professional and think of everything, I had an artificial mouse in my pocket, with which I was able to attract the attention of one of the archival interns:

Although this “opening gambit” of the mouse enjoyed a certain self-contained success, it failed to spark the lively debate I had been anticipating about the legal and cultural battle surrounding Kafka’s legacy. Rather, the intern seemed somehow unable to move beyond what one might call the pourparlers, so that really all I learned from our encounter was his position on artificial mice.  (pro)

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Cosmopolitan readers!  I am delighted to report that The Possessed hits bookstores in Australia today, or rather tomorrow, because it is already the future in Australia.  A big thanks to Text Publishing and all the koalas and kangaroos for their hard work!  (The Australian edition, like the third US print run, corrects some errata and includes some missing information from first two printings, viz. a reading list and a shout-out to all the heroic English translators, including Richard Pevear and Larisa Volokhonsky, who have done so much to bring Russian books to the people who read them.)  I’m also thrilled to be on board with the Melbourne Writers Festival this summer.  I have never been to Australia, but am told that Australian people call it Oz.

Speaking of Oz, I had a great time in Southern California last weekend.  More shout-outs are due to my dear former classmate Amelia Glaser of UCSD, as well as to the upstanding non-dentist Dennis Wills of D. G. Wills, for setting everything up in La Jolla.  Thanks also to David Scheinker, a strong Russian-speaking male graduate student, who not only carried a heavy box of books all around the UCSD campus, but also drove me to CVS for toothpaste while Amelia was stranded in London by the volcano.

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These are some of the literary works cited in The Possessed, in chronological order by author’s year of birth.

Mir Ali Shir Nevai (Alisher Navoi) (1441–1501). Layli and Majnun (1484); Farhod and Shirin (1484); The Seven Planets (1484); The Language of Birds (1498); The Judgment of Two Languages (1499).

Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur (1483–1530). The Baburnama (ca. 1529).

Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616). Don Quixote (1605, 1615).

William Cowper (1731–1800). The Task (1785). 

Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) (1783–1842). Rome, Naples, and Florence (1826); The Red and the Black (1830); The Charterhouse of Parma (1836).

Ivan Lazhechnikov (1792–1869). The House of Ice (1835).

Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837). Eugene Onegin (1833); “The Queen of Spades” (1834); Journey to Arzrum (1835); The Bronze Horseman (1837).

Nikolai Gogol (1809–52). Dead Souls (1842); “The Overcoat” (1842).

Ivan Goncharov (1812–1891). Oblomov (1859).

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81). The Idiot (1868–69); Demons (1872).

Lev Tolstoy (1828–1910). Anna Karenina (1875–77); The Kreutzer Sonata (1889); The Living Corpse (1900).

Henry James (1843–1916). The Portrait of a Lady (1881).

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930). Sherlock Holmes stories (1892–1927).

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904). “The Black Monk” (1894); “Lady with Lapdog” (1899); Uncle Vanya (1899).

Thomas Mann (1875–1955). The Magic Mountain (1924).

Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938). “Just for joy, take from my palms” (1920); “When Psyche—life—descends to the shades” (1920).

Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930). “Homeward!” (1925); “At the Top of My Voice” (1930).

Isaac Babel (1894–1940). 1920 Diary; “How It Was Done in Odessa” (1923); Red Cavalry (1926); “In the Basement” (1931); “Guy de Maupassant” (1932).

Abdulla Qodiriy (1894–1938). Past Days (1922–25).

Jorge Luis Borges (1899 –1986). “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940); “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” (1952).

Daniil Kharms (1905–42). “Pushkin and Gogol” (1934).

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008). Cancer Ward (1968).

Valentin Pikul (1928–1990). Word and Deed (1975).

Proliferating readers! It was a joy and an honor to meet so many of you last week in New York and Boston. Over 100 people turned up at McNally Jackson where I had a long conversation with my first editor, Keith Gessen, during which my oldest childhood friend, the prominent novelist Dara Horn, was so carried away by the emotion of the moment that she threw a small plastic dinosaur at my head.

Wednesday’s reading at Brookline Booksmith was also attended by numerous valued readers of My Life and Thoughts, including my aunt Deniz and her oldest childhood friend, who doesn’t believe in pasteurization, and who had commemorated the occasion by baking a wonderful chocolate cake made with nonpasteurized buttermilk.  We were joined for cake by super-guest-blogger Peli Grietzer, who attended the Manhattan event and the Brookline event, and asked questions on subjects ranging from Shklovsky’s Third Factory to a paragraph from my dissertation which it turned out I had sent him in like 2007, so you just tell me if he deserved some cake.

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The other day, my intern Friday and I were home working and started to get a bit fretful and snappy.  Normally I pride myself on maintaining a positive work environment so I was really disappointed with myself for letting things slide like that, and resolved to take drastic steps. Given that it was a beautiful sunny day, the natural course of action seemed to be for me to take Friday outside for a stimulating walk.

Here at My Life and Thoughts, we are all about occasionally letting the staff see the light of day—but only when they feel like it.  Join us on our three-part epic journey:

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