Fabulously amusing mock-academic flight of fantastic literary criticism about Russia's beloved national poet, Aleksandr Pushkin, written in 1966-67 by Tertz/Andrei Sinyavsky (Goodnight!, 1989; Little Jinx, 1992, etc.) while serving the first of seven years in a Soviet labor camp. When this finally saw light in Russia in 1989, Russian critics were outraged. Pushkin (1799-1837) was not only a Russian Negro but also the first ``civilian'' to make a name for himself in Russian literature, and Tertz (Sinyavsky's pen name when having fun) takes Pushkin down ten more pegs or so, calling him ``not a diplomat, not a secretary, a nobody. A goldbricker. A deadbeat...'' His Pushkin is a trickster of letters who made his name by avoiding all literary pretenses, writing lines of any length he pleased, and carrying on like an all-male puff or lazy dandy who had special insight into what the ladies needed—and gave it to them in verse, as well as in life. Later, he grew tired of his own spectacle and secretly yearned to be more common. Says Tertz: ``Since youth he had regarded his black otherness in society, inherited from his grandfather Ibrahim, with great enthusiasm, rightly viewing his wild pranks as a sign of the elemental force raging within him...[H]is Negro blood took him back to the primordial sources of art, to nature and myth.'' Tertz is especially keen on Pushkin's eroticism: ``When you read Pushkin, you get the feeling that he has some bond with women, that he is at home with women...It must be that flirts are somehow akin to women's aery composition, because of which they unconsciously want everything both within and around them to fly and flutter (isn't that...the origin of the skirt and other muslin and gauzy zephyrs of the feminine toilette?)...Women involuntarily sniff out in the flirt a brother in spirit.'' Read Tertz before the long essay by co-translator Nepomnyashchy.
Pub Date: Feb. 16, 1994
ISBN: 0-300-05279-0
Page Count: 177
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
The world didn't lose a great journalist when Gloria Steinem focused her energies on feminist activism—but because she was a working journalist (and, from 1968, political columnist for first-person-prone New York magazine), the light bulb goes on right here. This first collection of her writings (also, her first book) leads off with autobiographical comments: on the speaking she's done instead of writing, and how difficult ("a major hurdle in my life") and ultimately rewarding it was (kudos on both scores to her black lecture partners); on her earlier writing career, or the frustrations of frivolous, "girl reporter" assignments; on her first stabs at "telling the truth in public" and other outcomes of a "growing consciousness." From the pre-feminist writing, she includes only "I Was a Playboy Bunny"—a 1963 "exposÉ" of the crippling grind, the miserable pay, the sexual harassment (said a co-worker: "If you can type, what the hell do you want to be a Bunny for?")—and the first parts of a section of campaign reports, 1965-72. It's there, in 1968, that the "Feminist Realization" (born of covering women's meetings) hits home—eliciting the kind of protest that would quickly become a groundswell: "Six months ago I would have been honored by McGovern's invitation to a 'serious' (i.e., male and therefore grownup) political meeting, but full of doubt about whether I could contribute in a 'serious' (male) way. . . . I couldn't admit that any power relationship in life is political: therefore politics for women may be who's doing the dishes, or who's getting paid half the wages that a man would get for the same job, or who's expected to take the roles of service and support everywhere, including in political campaigns." A dozen pages later, after the 1972 Democratic Convention (Chisholm for president, Farenthold for V.P.): "Women are never again going to be mindless coffee-makers, or mindless policy-makers. . . ." That sense of being in at the creation is diluted by the non-chronological arrangement of the pieces in the remaining two-thirds of the book—pieces that are essentially feminist polemics whether the subject is food (women's smaller share or "Erotica vs. Pornography," (good) Jackie Kennedy or the (bad) heroine of Sophie's Choice. A partial exception is "Ruth's Song (Because She Could Not Sing It)," Steinem's previously unpublished memoir of her mentally-disturbed mother—whom she regards as a victim but also celebrates as a life-force. Still, her particular talent has been for perceiving the feminist angle, in her own writing and for Ms., and spreading that recognition. If some of the ideas here sound hackneyed, she has honest claim to them.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1983
ISBN: 0452257107
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1983
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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