Hmmm. Seems to be a pattern here….

(The Japanese also have their “issues” with Russia’s appetite…but somehow I’m a lot less sympathetic about that one even if at this point I’d like to see it resolved in Japan’s favor…. Of course that’ll NEVER happen…though “never” IS a long time….)

The Sovs had a very hard time beating the Finns. The analogy today would be spending a substantial amount of military capital–and social and international–to grab chunks of Ukraine without Lend Lease coming in the back door. And other potential victims are not doing the appeasement thing. See Sowell on Intellectuals and War. They’re out there but nobody’s listening this time.

“The Gift” is kind of a heavy lift. If you want to give Nabokov another try, go with “Pnin” (1957). It’s a portrait of a Russian emigre professor at a large American university that resembles Cornell, where Nabokov was teaching at the time. Brief, accessible, and surprisingly serious, with the tragedies in Pnin’s life surfacing from beneath the narrator’s layer of condescending humor. No nymphets.

On the topic of this thread: I guess I qualify as a russophile, at least as far as Russian literature is concerned. I never considered living there, however. To put it bluntly, I’d had enough of Russia and Russians when I got out of the Russia business thirty years ago. Furthermore, I very much hope Ukraine prevails in the current conflict. Which is why it concerns me that the Globe and Mail article that Barry linked to above (via Blazing Cat Fur) suggests that the fighting in the Donbas is taking place on Russia’s terms. Not good. I recall local commenter MKent sounding some prescient warnings about Russia’s military resilience back in late February-early March. Some commenters have compared the Russian invasion of Ukraine with the Soviet Union’s invasion of Finland in 1939-1940. Indeed, I was one of them. What I neglected to say was that the Soviet Union eventually succeeded in grabbing a chunk of Finnish territory despite a disastrous series of very costly early defeats. The same thing could happen in Ukraine. It is true that Col. MacGregor has been wrong about the course of the war so far. Let’s hope he continues to be wrong.

One may well sympathize….
In which case, better not read this either:
“The Unsolved Mystery Behind the Act of Terror That Brought Putin to Power”—
https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/08/vladimir-putin-1999-russian-apartment-house-bombings-was-putin-responsible/

Related:
“After fending off Russian troops in Kyiv, these Ukrainian special forces members are processing horrors and appealing for weapons”—
https://blazingcatfur.ca/2022/04/23/after-fending-off-russian-troops-in-kyiv-these-ukrainian-special-forces-members-are-processing-horrors-and-appealing-for-weapons/
Key phrase:
“…as if they expected there would be no resistance at all…”

File under: “…Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood…”

Plenty of argument has refuted nearly everything you’ve written on the subject of Russia vs. Ukraine, as well as analogies to the Cuban missile crisis, and you either haven’t read that argument or haven’t understood it.

Thanks for the response.

I just purchased Nabokov’s “The Gift” from Audible on your say-so and listened enough to wonder if it were Nabokov speaking straight or from a metafiction narrative device!

I would like to get into Nabokov, but “Lolita” blew me so far out of the water I wasn’t sure where to start again.

Sorry, haven’t read that book. It sounds interesting. One more thing for the retirement reading list.

If you’re looking for something shorter in a similar vein, I can recommend Mikhail Zoshchenko’s “Before Sunrise” (1943). It’s a psychological autobiography.

In my view, the best Russian-language novel of the 20th century is Vladimir Nabokov’s “The Gift” (originally published in serial form in Paris in 1938; re-issued in a complete edition by the Chekhov Press in NYC in 1952):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gift_(Nabokov_novel)

Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita” (completed in 1940, but not published until 1967) is also a great read. Very popular in Russia.

OT. A girlfriend read Paustovsky’s “Story of a Life” when we lived together and recommended it to me highly. It was long and I didn’t get to to it.

Did I miss a good book?

Azev reputedly was the model for the agent provocateur Lippanchenko in Andrei Bely’s 1913 novel “Petersburg” and the revolutionary terrorist Necator in Joseph Conrad’s 1912 novel “Under Western Eyes”. Both novels provide insight into the Russian penchant for paranoid conspiracy-mongering, grandiose theorizing, ruthless violence, and betrayal.

A fascinating example of a revolutionary who worked for the Okhrana was Sergei Zubatov, the inventor of “police socialism”:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Zubatov

Zubatov began his career with the Russian secret police as an informant but soon became an administrator. As a former revolutionary, he was a skilled and persuasive interrogator who favored persuasion and co-optation over coercion. A committed monarchist, he committed suicide after the February 1917 revolution. Some of his innovations anticipated the CIA’s cultivation of left-wing trade unions in Europe in the early years of the Cold War.