Currently on BBC Sounds: TAKE FOUR BOOKS
A.L. Kennedy talks about her new novel, ALIVE IN THE MERCIFUL COUNTRY, & its connections to 3 other literary works: MOBY-DICK by Herman Melville (1851); PETERSBURG by Andrei Bely (1913); & THE LORD OF THE RINGS by JRR Tolkien (1954)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00261ts
#Scottish #literature #novel #ALKennedy #MobyDick #HermanMelville #Petersburg #AndreiBely #LOTR #LordoftheRings #Tolkien
Drifting by the crowds,
By the yards
Face-on —
Into a telegraph post,
Into the upper cold.
Russia, with its decayed past and uncertain future, the Russia that emerged after the Russo-Japanese War and the quelled Revolution of 1905 - this is the broad theme of Andrei Bely's book "Ashes".
#SergeiSolovyov 1909
The sewage system is dilapidated; and the sewage from the yards is not removed (a famous professor in his own room, where the water is frozen, on the stove... heated up to thaw what was naturally carried out of the rooms).
#AndreiBely 1921
Russia is soulless, dead, driven only by the processes of decomposition.
#AndreiBely 1921
We flatten national poets, we take from them only what we like; and if we gazed intently at the face of Pushkin, Goethe, Blok, we would see that all our life we will be scooping out themes from this bottomless sea, from a sea of symbols.
Music is the unopened envelope of our destiny: in music is the content of future historical life; music is a dove from the summit of the coming Ararat, bringing its first, buttery branch into our ark.
Listening to music, we experience some huge destinies of huge people, to which we do not have access; listening to music, we want something, but our desires are interrupted by everyday life...
Music is the mathematics of our soul; in relation to the variety of thoughts and images it awakens. Music is, as it were, the law that triggers them in the soul.
The disintegration of the art world into separate channels is due to the complexity of the growing technical means; art was surrounded by the tools of production; they broke into the world of art; they broke the art.
Assoc for Scottish Literature
Siberian