From the diary of a writer-publisher: 8

13 March
Within seven hours of my last post going up, the organisers of the 2020 conference of the British Association of Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES) emailed everyone to say they were calling it off. Only an hour or two earlier I had emailed Sam1 in Russia that I thought cancellation was inevitable, given the momentum of both the virus and the, well, perhaps not panic, but societal proactivity… He, Sam1, replied that he thought Britain had one of the lowest incidences of Black Crow in Europe, and that he was quite happy still to come to the UK, even though he would have to self-isolate for a fortnight when he got back to Russia. What he did not know was that by then British epidemiologists were estimating there were already another 10,000 cases in the country.

Sam1 has a son who helps him with the computer side of Sam&Sam Moscow — indeed, he designed the Russian poster for our stall — and I am proposing referring to him as Sam1(a). Our younger son Jim does exactly the same for Sam&Sam Cambridge, of course, and I propose referring to him as Sam2(a). As a result of the cancellation, Sam2(a) and I (Sam2) will be having lunch at our favourite Polish restaurant this week to start designing a new website for Sam&Sam in the West. It will be much more like an online bookshop, based on the actual copies in stock here in Cambridge.

It may seem far off, but I have already committed to the next BASEES conference in Cambridge (2022). The poor organisers deserve every crumb of comfort one can offer them. When Black Crow has passed over, I would be extremely grateful for any suggestions from followers and viewers about where we could profitably mount our stall this year and next, bearing in mind that most of our books are in Russian.

14 March
Because Alison and I have had sequential colds all week, it feels as though ‘self-isolation’ has already begun. Bring it on! Living indoors takes one back to the unheated, very quiet, almost Trappist home life of the 1950s… Editing 200 pages of translations of Sergei Esenin for a friend, reading a long biography of Esenin and attempting to read a sociological work entitled Arts, Politics and Social Movements in the Fields and in the Streets, filing down haikus for submission to a magazine, researching the finer points of painting icons — suddenly I was about a week ahead with it all. Unprecedentedly, my reading pile was empty. What was I going to do, re-read Chekhov and Proust?

I stared at the books on my shelves that I had recently paid more than their auction value to have rebound, and decided it was time I read:

My last acquaintance with George Eliot was in 1957/58 and roughly 1960/61, when I read abridged versions of Silas Marner and The Mill on the Floss without even knowing that they were by a woman.

Middlemarch has been a complete revelation. I can’t put it down. From the two-page ‘Prelude’ alone I realised I was in the presence of a very fine nib indeed. Her choice of word is flawless. Her irony is ‘broader’ than Jane Austen’s, I think, but Eliot hasn’t stumbled once on that tightrope between showing and commenting. I love, for instance, her use of ‘theoretic’ rather than the modern ‘theoretical’:

[Dorothea’s] mind was theoretic, and yearned by its nature after some lofty conception of the world  which might frankly include the parish of Tipton and her own role of conduct there; she was enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects […]

In my reading so far, Eliot has used ‘theoretic’ only twice, but as a word it is definitive, speaks volumes. It should be reintroduced. There isn’t a superfluous word in this, either:

She was disposed rather to accuse the intolerable narrowness and the purblind conscience of the society around her; and Celia [her sister] was no longer the eternal cherub, but a thorn in her spirit, a pink-and-white nullifidian, worse than any discouraging presence in the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’.

Not to mention the wisdom of the local minister’s wife, Mrs Cadwallader:

These charitable people never know vinegar from wine till they have swallowed it and got the colic.

I have 571 more pages to go. I may have to ration myself. Can anyone suggest the next George Eliot I should read?

16 March
As one becomes more certain of one’s opinions on every subject, the temptation to dash off letters to newspapers becomes irresistible… But it can be resisted by having a blog!

A couple of weeks ago Matthew Parris had an article in The Times denouncing Edmund Burke, in which he said that Burke was ‘not a philosopher’. I happened to be reading Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful at the time, in a coverless 1812 edition that I had had bound in the same batch as Middlemarch, and was all for riposting to The Thunderer that this is utterly philosophical. In any case, one can’t deny that Burke was a political philosopher, whose Reflections on the Revolution in France have had enormous influence down to our day…

Last week’s Spectator contained a review of Archie Brown’s The Human Factor: Gorbachev, Reagan and Thatcher and the End of the Cold War by a British ambassador to Russia in the Gorbachev era. Both Brown and the ambassador think Gorbachev was wonderful. Gorbachev was imbued with ‘courageous optimism’, he ‘confronted ossified thinking throughout the Soviet machine’, he ‘refused to spill blood to preserve Soviet power’, he ‘ended nuclear confrontation’. There is truth in these assertions, but they overlook the vital fact that Gorbachev never believed in democracy. He repeatedly said in 1988 that there would never be ‘multi-party parliamentarianism’ in Russia. This now looks like a prophecy that came true, but what he meant at the time was ‘over my dead body will there be Western democracy in Russia’. How could he believe in real democracy if he was a communist party general secretary? I don’t think that, as an establishment man and an elitist, he ever regarded democracy as other than a threat, and I doubt whether he believes in it now. He certainly hasn’t spoken up for democracy against the ‘managed’ and ‘sovereign’ so-called democracy of the endless Putin monocracy. The ambassador’s idea that Gorbachev ‘hoped for democracy’ like ‘the rest of us’ is therefore laughable.

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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’  Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.