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In Cannibalistic Times

  In Cannibalistic Times Tatyana Tolstaya , translated by Jamey Gambrell April 11, 1991 issue Reviewed: The Great Terror: A Reassessment by Robert Conquest Oxford University Press, 570 pp., $24.95 Last year Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror was translated into Russian and published in the USSR in the journal Neva . (Unfortunately, only the first edition was published. I hope that the second, revised and enlarged edition will be published as well, if it is not suppressed by the censorship so recently revived in the Soviet Union.) The fate of this book in the USSR is truly remarkable. Many of those who opened Neva in 1989–1990 exclaimed: “But I know all this stuff already!” How did they know it? From Conquest himself. The first edition appeared twenty years ago in English, was translated into Russian, and infiltrated what was then a closed country. It quickly became an underground best seller, and there’s not a thinking person who isn’t acquainted with the book in one form or anot...
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The Angel of Retail

  Poems The Angel of Retail By  May 18, 2026 Save this story You spirit of grace in the taffy machine’s chrome arms At Morris’s Candy performing a sarabande Unknitting and knitting again immaculate sweets. You spirit of order in a plank across uprights Between us patrons and visible bottles: a bar, The barrier presence attending to our pleasure. Angel of displays recurrent, mortal and porous, Dry goods and hardware and the fearsome eyeless Heads I remember at Dlugos’s Ladies’ Hats. New spirits of the body, Pilates and Threading, I needed explained. My ignorance not like that Of those who hissed “At thy unequal’d Play The Alchymist: Oh fie upon ’em,” says Herrick Son of a goldsmith, praising Ben Jonson. Like Twain’s Dauphin and Duke, his Subtle the Alchemist scams Us townsfolk, selling Abel Drugger a magnet To attract customers. No joke, ruthless Angel: In Greenwood murderous white rioters destroyed Eldridge’s Grille and Lewis’s Meats and Sundries— More shocking than the bank,...
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Tsvetaeva: The Tragic Life

  Tsvetaeva: The Tragic Life | Charles Simic | The New York Review of Books Tsvetaeva: The Tragic Life Charles Simic February 13, 2003 issue Reviewed: Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917–1922 by Marina Tsvetaeva, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Jamey Gambrell Yale University Press, 250 pp., $24.95 Milestones by Marina Tsvetaeva, translated and with an introduction by Robin Kemball Northwestern University Press, 272 pp., $24.95 When it comes to the Russian poetry of the last century, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, and Boris Pasternak are reasonably familiar names, but not Marina Tsvetaeva, who is their equal. Because she is extraordinarily difficult to translate, her work is almost unknown, and even when it becomes available it makes little impression. She seems foreign and beyond reach with her elliptical syntax and her unusually tangled metaphors. There’s also the sheer volume and range of her writing. One of her long poems, for instance, celebrates Lindbergh’s t...
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