Innholdsfortegnelse for June 12, 2025 i The New York Review of Books

Christopher Benfey is a writer and critic based in Amherst, Massachusetts. He is the author of Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay, a family memoir. Philip Clark is the author of Dave Brubeck: A Life in Time. He is writing a sonic history of New York City. Christina Davis is the author of two books of poems, An Ethic and Forth a Raven. She is the Curator of the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard. Tim Flannery ’s books include Among the Islands: Adventures in the Pacific, Europe: A Natural History, and, with Emma Flannery, Big Meg: The Story of the Largest and Most Mysterious Predator That Ever Lived. Michael Hofmann is a poet and a translator from the German. His translation of Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Kairos won the 2024 International…

The wooden heartI wear over my ownlike a tiny armor platewas carved by the hands of a geography teacherfrom Melitopol.Maybe this is why it looks like a mapof all the hearts of all the womenwho left their homes in the dark of occupation,marching into the darkness of their future.“Enemies live at my place now,”says the geography teacherwho sells painted heartson a bridge in Bratislava.“If I couldI’d light up my ownlike a torchto show the wayhome, the target of fire.And then maybeit would stop aching during each air raid sirenas if signaling a change of weather.”“My heart,” says the geography teacher,“is petrified with hate.I am a wooden womanselling wooden hearts on a windswept bridge.There’s a dash instead of a place of residence in my biography.Pleasetake this heart as a gift.Maybe it’sthe…

To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement by Benjamin Nathans. Princeton University Press, 797 pp., $39.95 The freethinking Soviet dissidents who tried, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, to make space in their society for opinions and activities not authorized by the ruling Communist Party included a few genuine giants, most notably the physicist Andrei Sakharov and the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Many others remain largely unknown, but dozens of them appear in Benjamin Nathans’s history of the dissident movement, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause. In the struggles they waged for more than twenty years against a repressive dictatorship and its relentless political police force, the KGB, they won no memorable victories. Only the transformations of Soviet society initiated or permitted…

As I was waiting outside Kyiv’s main military hospital at the end of April, I saw a man in a wheelchair come out of the main gate. He wove gingerly past seven “hedgehogs”—the large metal antitank traps that were deployed across the capital’s streets at the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. Now they have almost all been cleared away. Soldiers were walking out of the gate carrying bags of medicine and large flat folders with their X-rays, while visitors were checking in. Amid this morning rush the man wheeled himself to the end of the short, blocked road leading to the street. There he lit a cigarette and watched the world go by. He was wearing a T-shirt in the yellow and pale blue Ukrainian colors. One…

Schoenberg: Why He Matters by Harvey Sachs. Liveright, 248 pp., $29.95; $19.99 (paper) A hijacked New York City subway train packed with petrified passengers is hurtling toward the South Ferry station. Walter Matthau, playing Lieutenant Garber of the New York City Transit Police, is negotiating with the hijackers over a two-way radio as funk bass patterns crisscrossing with the churn of atonal brass ratchet up the tension. David Shire’s score for The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, one of the truly great New York films of the 1970s, proves as integral to sustaining an atmosphere of fretful claustrophobia as Joseph Sargent’s keen-eyed direction. The thought of subway riders hijacked not only by hoodlums but also by atonal music will no doubt leave Arnold Schoenberg’s detractors grinning. Atonal music, which…

Anima: A Wild Pastoral by Kapka Kassabova. Graywolf, 368 pp., $20.00 (paper) Elixir: In the Valley at the End of Time by Kapka Kassabova. Graywolf, 380 pp., $18.00 (paper) To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace by Kapka Kassabova. Graywolf, 382 pp., $18.00 (paper) Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe by Kapka Kassabova. Graywolf, 379 pp., $20.00 (paper) Through much of recorded history nomads have been regarded with fear or revulsion by settled peoples. Christian Europe saw their waves of invasion as a God-sent punishment for sins, Asia quaked at the Mongols’ whole-sale massacres, and centuries later disgraced Chinese officials, exiled to the nomad-haunted deserts beyond the Great Wall, imagined themselves condemned to a region of barbarians and evil spirits. It was from settled societies,…

Fish Tales by Nettie Jones. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 252 pp., $27.00 Oh, honey. It simply crushes them. I have been teaching literature to college students, most of them younger than me, for over twenty years. And whether they’re trying to write stories or write about them, there comes a time every semester when I have to break it to them. That idea you have? That inspired reading? That formal innovation? It isn’t new. (Even the notion that it isn’t new isn’t new: “There is nothing new under the sun” comes from Ecclesiastes.) We live in a time especially ensorcelled by novelty. Artists have always valued originality, but there’s this competitive edge to it now, and it can turn litigious on a dime. Who did it first has become more important…

Chevengur by Andrey Platonov,translated from the Russianby Robert Chandler andElizabeth Chandler, with anintroduction by Robert Chandlerand an essay by Vladimir Sharov.New York Review Books,567 pp., $26.95 (paper) The Foundation Pit by Andrey Platonov,translated from the Russianby Robert Chandler, ElizabethChandler, and Olga Meerson,with notes and anafterword by Robert Chandlerand Olga Meerson.New York Review Books,224 pp., $16.95 (paper) Happy Moscow by Andrey Platonov,translated from theRussian by Robert Chandler,Elizabeth Chandler, and others.New York Review Books,266 pp., $17.95 (paper) Soul by Andrey Platonov,translated from the Russianby Robert Chandlerand Elizabeth Chandlerwith Katia Grigoruk, AngelaLivingstone, Olga Meerson,and Eric Naiman, withan afterword by John Berger.New York Review Books,335 pp., $18.95 (paper)…

The Director by Daniel Kehlmann, translated from the German by Ross Benjamin. Summit, 333 pp., $28.99 Daniel Kehlmann has been celebrated for two decades in Germany and Austria as the shooting star of contemporary literature, but his work, though translated into forty languages, has received far less attention in English. Now his latest novel, The Director, appears in English at the moment Americans need it most. On one level it’s the story of the film director G.W. Pabst, who left Europe for Hollywood in 1934 with a reputation as the leftist creator of such films as The Joyless Street, Pandora’s Box, and The Threepenny Opera. For reasons he never explained, he returned to Europe just when most artists, leftists, and Jews were desperately seeking passage in the other direction. There…