This week: John Bradford, Epictetus, Thomas Girton, Vladimir Sorokin & more.
Telluria, by Vladimir Sorokin, translated by Max Lawton (New York Review Books): In the 1980s, Vladimir Sorokin’s writing ran afoul of the Soviet censors, and he later earned condemnation as a smut-peddler for his puckish caricatures of Soviet leaders and their sacred cows. It would be hard to find a purer distillation of the feeling of being Soviet than his banned 1983 novel The Queue, a Godot-like story of a man’s wait in a never-ending, inexplicable line. But Sorokin’s work avoids the aesthetic pitfalls of polemic or moralization: a rare appearance in the United States last week revealed a thoughtful man enamored not with “battering rams” but with playing the great “game,” as he called it, of literature. Thus, visions of ice-cults in the Siberian wastes, love affairs between Soviet premiers, and a future society in which great books survive only as choice kindling for the expertly curated meals of a pretentious elite populate his literary landscape, at turns funny and terrifying (and quite often both at the same time). A new atlas of that landscape has appeared in Telluria, a set of fifty vignettes of a past/future world woven into a Borgesian tapestry of new cultures and beliefs. Telluria is the first offering in an ambitious new effort by the translator Max Lawton to bring Sorokin’s largely untranslated oeuvre to English readers. —IS
Epictetus: The Complete Works: Handbook, Discourses, and Fragments, edited and translated by Robin Waterfield (University of Chicago Press): Less than a century after the death of the philosopher Epictetus, the scholar Origen of Alexandria could credibly assert that he was more widely read than Plato. And like Plato’s man Socrates, Epictetus himself never wrote a word. It fell to his disciple Arrian to record the teachings of this Stoic; together with the works of Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Gaius Musonius Rufus, they present the clearest view we have of Stoicism as practiced in the ancient world. Epictetus was a former slave who, after being expelled from Rome, made his way to Greece to continue his lecturing. In his lessons, then, we find ancient wisdom applied to the concerns of common men. —RE
“John Bradford: For the Love of Paint,” at Anna Zorina Gallery (through October 15): That the painter John Bradford reveres the history of art there can be little doubt. His exhibition at Anna Zorina Gallery, now in its final week, depicts great art and great artists at their moments of creation and recognition. Bradford builds up substantial accretions of paint that look like abstractions up close but come into focus the farther back you stand. Especially interesting here are his interpretations of the great works of art depicted therein. At the far end of the exhibition, In Praise of Selling Art (2021), a large, sun-dappled work, of a room of paintings arranged salon-style, then brings it all together in one tour de force. Beyond just the love of paint, this exhibition captures a love of painters, and paintings, and painting them, all together. —JP
“Thomas Girtin (1775–1802): An Online Catalogue, Archive and Introduction to the Artist,” presented by the Paul Mellon Centre: Though Thomas Girtin’s name stands obscurely next to his sometime colleague J. M. W. Turner, his practice reveals much about the nature of art in eighteenth-century Britain. The son of a brushmaker, Girtin was first apprenticed to the painter Edward Dayes before striking out with prints, drawings, and watercolors of his own, debuting at the Royal Academy in 1794 and thereafter taking a series of tours around Great Britain that produced topographical and landscape views of distinction. The Paul Mellon Centre has done a major public service in producing a digital catalogue raisonné of all Girtin’s known work. From the more than fifteen hundred images digitized and catalogued here one gets a view of both the art trade in eighteenth-century Britain and the physical landscape of Britain itself. —BR
Podcasts:
“Joshua T. Katz & James Panero discuss ‘The beginnings.’” Occasioned by the fourth annual Circle Lecture of The New Criterion.
From the archive:
“The old Schell game,” by Victor Davis Hanson (October 2007). On The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger by Jonathan Schell.
Dispatch:
“The latter Caesars,” by Andrew Montiveo. A review of The Emperors of Byzantium by Kevin Lygo.