The Russians Are Coming

   With all this talk about Russia the past few days, I'm thinking of stirring myself up and returning to James Billington's The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretative History of Russian Culture. I've been interested in Russian history and culture since taking a course in pre-Soviet and another in Soviet history with Prof. Cynthia Whittaker at Baruch back in the eighties (just as perestroika was announced).

   Kiev, followed by Novogorod, then Moscow, carved a nation out of wilderness that despite all the setbacks of the past twenty years, remains the largest country in the world. In the face of a daunting climate, devastation and subjugation by the Mongols, religious schisms, civil wars, and autocracy, the Russians have perservered, and even thrived. They also have a nice, dark sense of humor about their trials and tribulations.
   In more recent years, Russian Orthodoxy and its icons, saints, and hermits have intrigued me. Raised in a very Protestant tradition, and which I still hold to, there's something about the deep unworldliness of Russian Orthodox, at least in the abstract, that is striking and I'd like to get a better understanding of.
   So, to "celebrate", here's a host of cool Russian art depicting heroes, cities, and legends.

Rurik, Varangian founder of Kievan Rus - Statue commemorating his arrival in Novgorod

Baptism of Saint Prince Vladimir by Viktor Vasnetsov

Kiev's great hero, Ilya Muromets

Heroes Dobrynya Nikitich, Ilya Muromets, and Alyosha Popovich

Novgorod Market by Apollinari Vasnetsov

Ancient Moscow by Apollinari Vasnetsov

Ivan the Terrible Under the Walls of Kazan (1552) by Pyotr Korovin

Defense of the Troitse-Sergiyeva Lavra against the Poles in 1610 by Sergey Miloradovich

Mail Bag - pre-Christmas presents to myself

The e-book revolution continues as more and more books long out of print come on line. There's a long list of titles tucked in the back of my brain, of books I want to read but never found a copy of. Usually it's because they're out of print. Problem is, that list is old and rarely consulted. I need something to trigger it. So I have to wait for some random event to remind me I'm supposed to be keeping an eye open for a title and then look to see if it's available at some reasonable price. That little mental "ping" I'm listening for went off twice in the last month.

The first time was for James Stoddard's The High House. I've been curious about this one since Howard Andrew Jones wrote about it this past summer. Tooling around the net looking for other people's comments on Joy Chant's Red Moon and Black Mountain I came across Stoddard's site and saw The High House (and its sequel The False House) was now out as an e-book. So I bought it. Haven't started it yet, but am very curious.

The other e-book I snagged is MAR Barker's The Man of Gold. The prompt for this one came when I was reading some stuff about James Maliszewski's Empire of the Petal Throne magazine, The Excellent Travelling Volume. I've always been curious about EofPT. Even though most reviews of the book emphasize it's kind of dull, they all point out, it's a great introduction to the mad inventiveness of Tékumel. So I bought it. At $5.99 it's a really "Why not?" situation.

The last book is different. By the recently retired Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington, it's The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretative History of Russian Culture. With an eye more to cultural history, it looks at Russia from the founding of Kiev, Moscow's ascendancy, and finally to the Revolution and the Soviet Union. Published in 1970, I expect it will feel a little truncated today. 

This was referenced in one of the laudatory reviews I've read of the recent novel, Laurus by the Russian author Eugene Vodolazkin. It's about a Russian holy man in the Middle Ages and sounds great, but I think I'll benefit from a better grounding in the period before reading it. 

I've read the long sample of Billington's book offered by Amazon and loved it, so I think I might get to this book sooner as opposed to later.