• A party in Princeton

    I have a journalist's instinct to prolong conversations, an English retience about asking personal questions and a terrible memory for names: which makes me a dunce at parties. You could put me in a corner with the president of France, I would bore him all evening, and when it was over I would be able to tell you only that I had met somebody who knew a whole lot about French politics.

    Yesterday I went to Princeton for the launch of Nina Khrushcheva's much-praised book on Nabokov, and met, by my imperfect reckoning: (i) a man of English descent who was on a high floor of one of the twin towers on 9/11 and survived; (ii) a professor of French descent who negotiated with the Russians in occupied Berlin in 1945; (iii) a woman who has moved to New Jersey from Santa Monica and fallen in here with a monastery of Tibetan Buddhists; and (iv) an architect who lived in Russia as a boy under Nikita Khrushchev, and made his pocket-money hawking cigarettes.

    The talk was of American politics, including the view that Paul Krugman has been letting down Princeton badly by turning on Barack Obama.

    And of Russian politics. Steve Myers of the New York Times (I know it was him, because we exchange business cards) pointed out that George Bush would have a popularity rating equal to Vladimir Putin's in Russia, if he had Putin's control of the broadcast media—which puts today's Russian election into perspective.

    Driving back into Manhattan, just before the Lincoln tunnel, I saw a billlboard advertising a Panasonic laptop computer, with the slogan:

    "Legally, we cannot say this is the official laptop of the US Army".

    I do believe this is the closest thing to a logical paradox that I have seen in a public place.


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  • Khrushcheva on Nabokov

    Yesterday evening I was at the New School University on 12th Street listening to Nina Khrushcheva read from, and talk about, "Imagining Nabokov", her new book, which also, or so it seems to me, constitutes a new genre—part literary criticism (of Nabokov's novels), part political science (about Russia and the West), and part magical realism (about her own imagined relationship with Nabokov). All written in a voice that slips in and out of Nabokov's own.

    Seeing Nina sitting there as Author is a faintly scary moment. I know her well as a friend and coversationalist. Yet here she is revealed, no question, as a great writer.

    She manages modestly and well the parallels between her own life and Nabokov's. As she says in her introduction:

    Vadimir Nabokov's family was of political significance in Russia in the early 1900s. His father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, was an intellectual and a member of Russia's aristocratic ruling class, serving in the Russian provisional government in 1917 before the Bolshevik Revolution. My own family was of Soviet political significance in the mid-1950s. From Joseph Stalin's death in 1953 to 1964, Nikita Khrushchev, my great-grandfather, headed the ruling class of the Communist nomenklatura as the party's general secretary. The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution drove the Nabokovs out of the country, depriving them of their aristocratic privileges. The 1964 plenary meeting of the Communist politburo ousted Khrushchev ... Despite the world of difference between these two "oustings" they qualify both families as part of a "deposed elite".

    Nabokov's family took him into European exile in 1919; he went to America to escape the Nazis in 1940. Nina left Russia in 1991 to study comparative literature at Princeton:  read more »


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  • Is Russia becoming our enemy?

    Phobes staged a narrow victory over philes at last night's Intelligence Squared debate here in New York: "Russia is becoming our enemy again".

    A good debate but a slippery motion, as it were. You could worry away at every word of it, which the speakers did. Everybody seemed to agree that Russia was in a bad phase, and doing bad things, if mainly at home —though nobody mentioned Chechnya, I think, not even once. The hot-buttons this time were "Politkovskaya" and "Litvinenko".

    Edward Lucas moderated brilliantly. Claudia Rosett, Bret Stephens and Michael Waller, a WSJ crowd, spoke for the motion, saying (a bit feebly) that you didn't have to think Russia was our enemy, only that it was heading in that direction.

    Mark Medish, Robert Legvold and Nina Khrushcheva thought either that Russia wasn't our enemy, or that even if it was we shouldn't say so, for fear of making it into one.

    For my money, there wasn't enough talk about who "we" were. You'd be pretty hard pushed to say that Russia wasn't becoming Estonia's enemy, for example; Estonia is part of Nato and the EU; does that make Russia "our" enemy?

    Mark Medish gave the best speech, arguing that you couldn't divide countries into friends and enemies exclusively, there was a big middle ground where you had to work hard at relations, and Russia was deep in that grey area. True, I thought, but it didn't answer the burden of the motion, which was about the trend of Russian policy.  read more »


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