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The Solitary Notetaker

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NYBooks Logo. Link to Homepage My Account Logout Site logo Politics Collapse Literature Collapse Arts Collapse Ideas Collapse Current Issue Current Issue More from the Review Events All Issues About Us Shop Literary Gifts Shop NYRB Classics The Solitary Notetaker Charles Simic August 11, 2005 issue Reviewed: Campo Santo by W.G. Sebald, translated from the German by Anthea Bell Random House, 221 pp., $24.95 Unrecounted by W.G. Sebald, translated from the German by Michael Hamburger, with lithographs by Jan Peter Tripp New Directions, 109 pp., $22.95 W. G. Sebald; drawing by David Levine Buy Print When W.G. Sebald died in a car accident in December 2001, he was eulogized in Great Britain and America as one of the great writers of our time. And yet, before his first book, The Emigrants , was translated into English in 1996, very few had ever heard of him outside Germany. The reception of that first book and the others that soon followed in quick order was simply astonishing. He was called...
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Was Vladimir Putin’s tyranny inevitable?

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  Culture | An alternative history of Russia and the world Was Vladimir Putin’s tyranny inevitable? A new book about Boris Nemtsov, a Putin critic, makes you wonder Save Share Summary From Russia with blood Photograph: Reuters Feb 19th 2026 | 5 min read Listen to this story The Successor. By Mikhail Fishman. Translated by Michele Berdy. Pushkin Press; 800 pages; £35. To be published in America in May; $40 F ORMALLY, THE successor to Russia’s first post-Soviet president, Boris Yeltsin, was Vladimir Putin . In every other sense—ideologically, morally, temperamentally—Yeltsin’s successor was a liberal politician, Boris Nemtsov (pictured). Yet instead of governing Russia, Nemtsov became a champion of Russia’s increasingly beleaguered opposition, before being gunned down in 2015 near the Kremlin, the victim of a Chechen hit squad. Reading “The Successor”, a chronicle of Russia’s emergence from Soviet communism and its subsequent collapse into dictatorship, you cannot escape an unsettl...
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