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Songs Beyond Mankind

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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 Songs Beyond Mankind Adam Kirsch June 23, 2016 issue Reviewed: Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry by Paul Celan, translated from the German and with commentary by Pierre Joris Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 654 pp., $40.00 On July 25, 1967, postwar Germany’s greatest poet paid a call on its greatest philosopher. Such a meeting would be historically significant no matter what else was at stake; but the encounter of Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger was also haunted by the ghosts of Germany’s terrible recent history. Heidegger was a well-known early supporter of Nazism, who as rector of Freiburg University eagerly sought to align the academy with the new values of Hitlerism. Though he later retreated from this public position, he never came out with the open apology an...
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Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871 by Joseph Frank

  The Artist at High Tide J.M. Coetzee March 2, 1995 issue Reviewed: Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871 by Joseph Frank Princeton University Press, 523 pp., $35.00 Since the 1950s Joseph Frank has been laboring steadily at one of the great biographical projects of our times, a five-volume life of Fyodor Dostoevsky. The volumes can be read independently; each makes absorbing reading. The fourth, which has now appeared, is of particular interest, since it covers the period between 1865 and 1871, the years of Dostoevsky’s greatest sustained achievement, when he wrote Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868), and The Devils (1871–1874). In 1864 both Dostoevsky’s first wife and his beloved elder brother Mikhail died. Dostoevsky was a dutiful family man. Without hesitation (but also without guessing what he was letting himself in for) he assumed responsibility for Mikhail’s wife and children and for the huge debts Mikhail had left behind, as well as for his dead wife’s s...
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