Category: Arts and Letters

[H]is reproachful eyes caressed and gnawed me from his portrait.(From Mandelshtam’s Voronezh Notebooks) For many years the existence of Osip Mandelshtam’s “Ode to Stalin” was in doubt. With the publication of Nadezhda Mandelshtam’s Hope Against Hope, this doubt was resolved and the “Ode” became better known, though often indirectly through

1 Were I to work in charcoal that would draw the highest praise –my ode to joy – its silent oscillation –I’d draw in cunning angles –anxiously, uneasily –the present in the lines would answer,and art border on audacityto picture him who honours cultures of one hundredforty nations while he

Panni Palásti’s Budapest Girl (Maitai River Press, New Zealand, 2015, 327 pages) is subtitled “An Immigrant Confronts the Past”, and while the title tells where this girl migrated from, she maintains that all emigrants’ views of the past, considered at eighty, will have much in common, whatever their country of

For Matthew Eshleman Are you, Muse, the spume off Laussel, archaicdust dimpled & savoury that I nourish to steel myselfagainstthe Selfhood that lays claim to all rapture?Is your fertility still based in the blood-filled bison hornLaussel grasps in her right hand raised slightly below herhead? Might the egg-shaped relief of

Since 2009, the Hungarian Academy of Arts has been excavating Machaerus, the Herodian royal castle overlooking the Dead Sea in the Kingdom of Jordan, where Princess Salome danced and Saint John the Baptist was imprisoned and killed. The latter happening is not based purely on the holy tradition of Christian

Prologue Decades of delay A stranger can ask a question that changes the way you see your life. “Why did you wait for six decades to write this memoir?” I wanted to forget the war. “Why don’t you mention until page 74 that your father was Jewish?” Why? Maybe because

Aisling was a tourist guide working in the great house of Castletown, in Celbridge, arriving daily to her place of work on horseback. She lived in a cottage on the left side of the Liffey, where her mother kept horses and a llama. Aisling was a pretty girl but not

Is there anyone who has not heard of the terrible tempest on the Ligurian Sea which claimed the life of Percy Bysshe Shelley? In almost precisely the same place, near the mouth of Spezia Bay off the coast of Porto Venere, another storm had wrecked a vessel three centuries before

The exhibition of Imre Ámos, Painter of the Apocalypse opened at the Gallery of the Hungarian Academy in Rome on 11 February 2016, under the anspices of the Balassi Institute of Budapest. The occasion inaugurated Hungary’s assumption of the rotating annual presidency of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Culled