a blind flaneur

I paid attention to a Fresh Air interview this morning when I heard William Hurt talk about an ethical approach to the craft of acting. He described the process he followed to prepare for a single scene in the film A History of Violence, which he resists calling a cameo, for which he received an Oscar nomination in 2005. In the interview he quoted Russian director Constantin Stanislavski on the core ethos of method acting.

It’s an unexamined myth today among many Americans that Ronald Reagan single-handedly won the Cold War and engineered the collapse of the Soviet Union. This narrow-minded notion gives no credit to the people of Eastern Europe who resisted Soviet oppression for decades until they succeeded in outlasting it. In a new book about the nuclear arms race, The Dead Hand, journalist David E. Hoffman argues that Mikhail Gorbachev had as much to do with backing up from the brink as Reagan did. In an interview with Terry Gross on NPR Fresh Air, Hoffman explains that Reagan needed to see a made-for-TV movie about nuclear armageddon before he decided to get serious about trying to prevent it.

To Red Army photographer Yevgeny Khaldei, staging an iconic photo wasn’t a manipulation of history but a tribute to historical significance. His most famous photo of Soviet soldiers raising the Red Star over the Reichstag in Berlin reenacted a triumphal moment on the night of April 30, 1945, when it was too dark to photograph.

Even weather wants brand loyalty these days. “Blizzard” isn’t good enough. Wags on the east coast are working overtime to coin catchy  names like Snowpocalypse and Snoverkill for the latest storms. I have to admit, I liked the sound of Snowmageddon 2.0 for yesterday’s second punch.
As I shoveled my sidewalk last night under glowering skies, [...]

Nathan Altman. Portrait of Anna Akhmatova. 1914. The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. [Source: Anna Akhmatova Foundation]
Anna Akhmatova had become a cultural icon by the time Nathan Altman painted her in 1914. Her bangs and shawl, her regal bearing and unassailable assurance, constituted the Akhmatova look. Her poems were read avidly in St. Petersburg, [...]

What I found, remarkably, were recordings of Anna Akhmatova reading poems late in her life in the 1960s. This may be as close as we can come to hearing Mandelstam’s voice. Indeed, Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandelstam preserved his verse in their voices and memories for three decades, resurrecting it furtively from inner speech, reciting it aloud to one another in the privacy of their rooms, then preserving it again in memory. Only after a political “thaw” came after Stalin’s death could Mandelstam’s poetry begin to be spoken publically and printed in books.

Early in my study of Lev Vygotsky’s work I asked an experimental psychologist, an eminent authority on the evolution of the mammalian brain, what he knew about Vygotsky. He was working on sabbatical in London at the time, so our email conversation had the abbreviated quality of inner speech. He explained that he had looked [...]

The abridged translation of Thought and Language also omitted passages which the translators considered obscure, overly philosophical, and extraneous to the book’s scientific arguments. In the unabridged translation Kozulin noted, without elaboration, that some of Vygotsky’s conclusions were influenced by Mandelstam’s essay “On the Nature of the Word” (273). A seminal expression of Mandelstam’s poetics [...]

As Vygotsky probed deeper into the inner processes of thought and language, he reached motive. “Thought is not begotten by thought,” he wrote. “It is engendered by motivation, … by our desires and needs, our interests and emotions. Behind every thought there is an affective-volitional tendency” (252). Vygotsky posited motive on the deepest, most inward [...]

In Russian the title of Vygotsky’s book is Myshlenie i Rech. This can be translated literally as “Thought and Speech,” but the word rech also connotes “language” and “discourse.” Similarly, the title of Vygotsky’s final chapter is “Myshlenie i Slovo.” One of the most profound words in the Russian language, slovo (“word”) can mean a [...]