On Czesław Miłosz: Visions from the Other Europe, by Eva Hoffman (Princeton University Press): “Among the many enduring literary monuments that have been left to us in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union,” declared Hilton Kramer, “none has proven to be more profound in its comprehension of the evil character of Soviet power than Czesław Miłosz’s Captive Mind (1953).” The poet-exile witnessed firsthand Hitler’s invasion of Poland, decades of statelessness, and Berkeley in the Sixties—but Miłosz wrote not just of ugly things. As Eva Hoffman tells us in On Czesław Miłosz, he wrote also of “outlasting human things,” always maintaining a “fidelity to the poetry of beauty and meaning rather than of nihilism.” Tidy and thoughtful, Hoffman’s reflection on Miłosz benefits from not just their common nationality, but also the long friendship the two shared. Here is a penetrating introduction to a vital penman. —LL
“Judging a Book by Its Cover: Bookbindings from the Collections of The Grolier Club, 1470s–2020,” New York (opens January 17): Founded in 1884, New York’s Grolier Club, America’s oldest society of bibliophiles, has long promoted the art of bookbinding among its membership. Through the development of the society’s own bindery, according to the club member H. George Fletcher, a former books curator at the New York Public Library and the Morgan Library, members no longer had to send their rare books off to France for treatment. Fletcher now carries on the Grolier’s bookbinding interests with his exhibition on “Judging a Book by Its Cover: Bookbindings from the Collections of The Grolier Club, 1470s–2020.” Drawing on the society’s own holdings, the exhibition brings together one hundred examples of rare bindings, starting with a circa 1473 brass-and-pigskin volume on Jewish Antiquities and the Jewish War and Ecclesiastical History, through a jeweled miniature Book of Hours (1673), on up to a gilded freehand design by Ulrich Widmann from 2019. —JP
At the Louvre: Robert Polidori, edited by Sebastien Allard (Rizzoli Electa): The Louvre may be the most visited art museum in the world, daily teeming with hordes of art adorers and indifferent tourists alike. But Tuesdays are different, for then the museum is closed to the public. Robert Polidori was invited to capture photographically some special Tuesdays at the museum, when an exhibition of paintings from Naples’s Museo di Capodimonte was being hung in the Grande Galerie. The result is At the Louvre: Robert Polidori, a documentary record of each Tuesday between the exhibition’s first hangings and its opening, giving us a look into both museological practice and the secrets an empty Louvre holds. —BR
Kirill Gerstein at Carnegie Hall, New York (January 18): Few folk dances have had such widespread cultural and political influence as the polonaise, which has its roots in a stately processional dance of the Polish court. Once Russia occupied much of Poland, the polonaise became wildly popular in the empire and a cipher for the pomp of the Romanov dynasty. In America, a legend that the Polish hero of the Revolutionary War (and anti-Romanov partisan) Tadeusz Kościuszko had invented the dance lent it patriotic undertones and popularity in American ballrooms. Thus, by the time Chopin sat down to write his famed polonaises in the 1830s and 1840s, the idiom had already been abstracted from its origins in the courts of Warsaw and Krakow. Chopin’s feat was to elevate it formally and return it to the center of Polish musical and political culture. This Thursday Carnegie Hall brings things full circle when the Russian pianist Kirill Gerstein performs Chopin’s Polonaise-fantaisie in A-flat Major, Op. 61, the last of Chopin’s polonaises published during his lifetime and a daring, impressionistic mélange of musical themes and colorations. Works by Fauré, Poulenc, Liszt, Schumann, and Godowsky will also feature. —IS
Dispatch:
“Thrown overboard,” by Joshua T. Katz. On the future of the Harvard Corporation.
From the Archives:
“Wagner: moralist or monster?” by Roger Scruton (February 2005). A review of Richard Wagner: The Last of the Titans by Joachim Köhler.
“Europhiles & ‘Little Englanders,’” by Roger Scruton (January 1998). On English Common Law & the European Union.