By Stuart Mitchner

In the unlikely event that the New York Times Book Review or anyone else ever asks me what books are on my night stand, the tome that’s been there for years waiting for me to write about it is Carl Van Vechten’s The Tiger in the House: A Cultural History of the Cat (Knopf 1920), which has been called “the best single treatise on the cat” and “a treasure house of literary gossip.” Like so many of my books, this one, the 1936 edition, has passed through the secondhand bookstores of Manhattan and therefore embodies three of my favorite things — cats, used bookstores, and New York City. more

By Stuart Mitchner 

Imagine a literary theme park, a Disneyland for readers and their kids where you can ride a raft with Huck and Jim, or climb aboard the Pequod with Ishmael, or fish the Big Two-Hearted River with Hemingway. Since the former Soviet Union is ever more massively imminent as we approach the moment of truth about Russian involvement in last year’s election, let’s say you could also visit a Chekhov pavilion complete with cherry orchard or tour Tolstoy’s estate where little Natashas can enjoy horseback rides and make-believe balls, or better yet you could take your chances in a fun house of existential chills dedicated to the work of Dostoevsky. Given the American public’s undying fascination with the dark side, the Dostoevsky House would draw the biggest crowds.  more

By Stuart Mitchner

I was still in my teens when I read Dostoevsky for the first time. Going from Holden Caulfield in New York to a Russian student plotting an act of murder in St. Petersburg seemed like growing up. Crime and Punishment was electric, fascinating, a new world.

I was 20 when I read The Possessed, older but not much wiser. I was out of my depth, unprepared for the upgrade from a philosophical axe murderer named Raskolnikov to a charismatic child molestor named Stavrogin. It would have helped if I’d been able to read the chapter in which Stavrogin describes his crime, but it was considered too shocking to print in 1872 no matter how often Dostoevsky tried to tone it down.  more

Great writers and artists ought to take part in politics only so far as they protect themselves from politics.  — Anton Chekhov

By Stuart Mitchner

Almost exactly 80 years ago, November 21, 1937, the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra gave the premiere performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony. According to Laurel Fay’s Shostakovich: A Life, the audience was aware that the 31-year-old composer’s “fate was at stake.” Two of his most recent works, an opera and music for a ballet, had been attacked at Stalin’s behest in Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party’s Central Committee; in effect, he had been “cast down overnight from the summit among the brightest stars of young Soviet composers to the abyss as pernicious purveyor of cultural depravity.” Meanwhile friends and colleagues were “disappearing.” Members of his family had been arrested, exiled, sent to labor camps. One of his foremost supporters had been charged with treason and executed. In case he doubted how dangerously close he was to being labeled an enemy of the state, the Fourth Symphony, his most ambitious work to date, was forcibly withdrawn on the eve of its debut performance because instead of following the party line, it appeared to be an even more extreme expression of his “depraved, difficult, formalist Western” values.  more

By Stuart Mitchner

So, with the crash of artillery, in the dark, with hatred, and fear, and reckless daring, new Russia was being born.

—John Reed (1887-1920)

Here he is again, George Kennan, our Hodge Road landlord in the 1980s. It can’t be helped. When the overriding subject of the hour is Russia, Kennan is always there. If he were alive today, he would be the guest of choice on cable and network news, whether the subject were Russian “meddling,” or the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, or even the admirable Fox series The Americans with its bizarre bromances — FBI agent Stan and his neighbor Philip, a Russian spy, and Stan and the KGB’s Oleg, who have bonded in spite of themselves over love of the same Russian woman.  more

By Stuart Mitchner

With Russian hacking, Russian interference, and the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution dominating the news, it’s a time to look at another, less insidious side of the U.S.-Russia dynamic. If you extend the possibilities inherent in “hacking” and tweak “interference” as “influence,” then anyone in this or any other country who has been susceptible to the work of Russian writers, artists, and composers has been “hacked.” At 18, I was drunk on the novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and the symphonies of Shostakovich, fascinated, thrilled, exalted, under the influence. A lifetime later one of my most trusted sources of positive influence is a Russian whose work was of little interest to me then. more

By Stuart Mitchner

The New York bus stops outside the building I work in. Several times a day I see it idling in front, waiting for the light to change. In the car last week listening to a CD of live jazz from May 1953, I hear the announcer say “We’re coming to you from Birdland, Broadway at 52nd Street, the heart of Manhattan” and I know it’s time to get on that bus. I’m thinking of the lost city of automats and movie palaces when the Dodgers were still in Brooklyn and I was allowed into jazz clubs in my mid-teens. more

By Stuart Mitchner 

On one of last week’s unseasonably hot heavy days, deep in the late-afternoon do-nothing know-nothing blahs, I tried to pull out by reading the latest New Yorker and only felt worse. Next I tried King Lear, usually a reliable energy source, but this is the play that begins when Lear tells Cordelia “Nothing will come of nothing,” which dooms them both and is the word at the dead center of my ennui. more

By Stuart Mitchner

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins explained the difference between novelists and poets this way: “I think of the novelist as a houseguest. The poet is more someone who just appears. You know, a door opens and there’s the poet! He says something about life and death, closes the door and is gone. Who was that masked man?” more

By Stuart Mitchner

Sixty years ago yesterday Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was published, “a historic occasion” according to the New York Times, which called it “the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat,’ and whose principal avatar he is.” more

By Stuart Mitchner

On the age-old problem of how to begin, what better guide than John McPhee? In his new book Draft No. 4: John McPhee on the Writing Process (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux $25), he says “a lead should not be cheap, flashy, meretricious, blaring. After a tremendous fanfare of verbal trumpets, a mouse comes out of a hole blinking.” He goes on: “The lead — like the title — should be a flashlight that shines down into the story.” And then: “A lead is good not because it dances, fires cannons, or whistles like a train but because it is absolute to what follows.” more

By Stuart Mitchner

… I watched Carnie as she sang. I was looking at my daughter and thinking about when she was little; about her sister when she was little; about how I was young then, too; about the cover of Sunflower; about feeling my mom’s hands as she lowered me into the crib. People are beautiful. Life can be, too. —Brian Wilson

A week after the 72nd anniversary of Hiroshima, with people talking about fall-out shelters again thanks to the blustering president and his North Korean counterpart, i’ve been thinking about what makes life worth living, things like family, pets, comfort food, art and literature, baseball and rock and roll.  more

By Stuart Mitchner

Kathryn Watterson’s I Hear My People Singing: Voices of African American Princeton (Princeton Univ. Press) takes its title from the Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood’s most famous citizen, Paul Robeson (1898-1976), who celebrates “the honest joy of laughter in these homes, folk-wit and story, hearty appetites for life, and warmth of song” in “hard-working people … filled with the goodness of humanity.” Coming from a man known above all for his prowess as a singer, the emphasis is on “the warmth of song,” as in “Songs of love and longing, trials and triumphs … hymn-song and ragtime ballad, gospels and blues.”  more

By Stuart Mitchner

If I am a wild Beast, I cannot help it. — Jane Austen, from a letter

“Every time I read Pride and Prejudice,” Mark Twain once wrote to a friend, “I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.” The sheltered drawing-room stereotype of Jane Austen that Twain is ridiculing only redounds to the power of her art. If anything, his vehemence suggests a kind of backhanded recognition of the “wild beast” of a writer she spontaneously and perhaps inadvertently reveals in a May 24, 1813, letter to her elder sister Cassandra. more

By Stuart Mitchner

It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.

—Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Today is Thoreau’s 200th birthday. It’s unlikely that the author of Walden would find all the hoopla “worth the while” — a three-day bicentennial gala in Concord, Mass.; inns and motels booked three years in advance; as many as 750,000 people estimated to be making the pilgrimage to Walden Pond in this celebratory year; the publication of new biographies and numerous books; a full-scale exhibit, “This Ever New Self: Thoreau and His Journal,” at the Morgan Museum and Library in New York.  more

By Stuart Mitchner

… the minister, looking upward to the zenith, beheld there the appearance of an immense letter, — the letter A, — marked out in lines of dull red light. 

—Nathaniel Hawthorne, from The Scarlet Letter

Like Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was born on July 4, 1804, David Lynch knows how to sear his brand into the brains of his audience. Some viewers are still trying to shake the surreal image of the thing that slithers into the first-kiss sanctity of sleeping innocence at the end of Episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return. Those of us who have survived the first eight weeks of this most unsettled and unsettling series were given a July 4 holiday break on Sunday. Who knows why? Maybe Lynch is allowing us a week off to ponder the feast of excesses in “Gotta Light?,” his latest serving of killer coffee and spiked cherry pie. Or maybe this is his subtle way of marking the birthday of his predecessor in the never-ending investigation of the American mystery.  more