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3 weeks ago | 
lawliberty.org | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |Spencer Klavan |Richard Alan Ryerson |Alex J. Pollock
The addresses collected in We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsynwere written by a man on the run. The earliest is his Nobel Prize lecture, printed in 1972 after he sent it to Stockholm in place of a live appearance. Given the way his novels depicted Soviet Russia, he worried that if he traveled to Sweden in person, he might never be allowed back. He was probably right.
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1 month ago | 
newcriterion.com | John Byron Kuhner |Hilton Kramer |Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |Daniel Mendelsohn
In May 2023, I had a review that began, “It’s Mozart Month at the Metropolitan Opera.” Two new productions had premiered in the house: of Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute. March 2025 is another Mozart Month at the Met. The company revived The Magic Flute last night, and will revive its Marriage of Figaro on the 31st. The Met’s Magic Flute production is the handiwork of Simon McBurney. I wrote about the production at some length when it premiered.
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1 month ago | 
newcriterion.com | John Byron Kuhner |Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |Daniel Mendelsohn |John Derbyshire
In 1970, the Procurator General of the Discalced Carmelite Order, Finian Monahan, was summoned to the Vatican for a meeting. The subject of the meeting was a promising young American priest by the name of Reginald Foster. The head Latinist of the Vatican’s State Department had tapped Foster to write papal correspondence, which was at the time composed entirely in Latin. Foster wanted the job but was bound by a vow of obedience, and the decision would be made by his superiors.
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1 month ago | 
newcriterion.com | John Derbyshire |Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |Victor Davis Hanson |James Penrose
Recent stories of note: “‘Edgar Allan Poe’ Review: The Soul Within the Shadow” Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Wall Street Journal Few American poems are so recognizable to the public as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” (Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” is the other top contender.) And Poe’s dark short stories are nearly as well-known: think “The Tell-Tale Heart” or “The Cask of Amontillado.” Like Poe’s most famous works, his life was grim—plagued by alcoholism and riddled with lost loves—and brief, with...
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1 month ago | 
newcriterion.com | John Derbyshire |Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |Victor Davis Hanson |James Penrose
Our popular arts do not easily express faith. This is not only because of what artists choose as a subject but also the manner they adopt, and it isn’t a uniquely contemporary problem. When the nineteenth-century art critic John Ruskin stated that a “noble style” would apply to both house and church, he protested the British tendency to reserve the Gothic for their cathedrals and chapels.
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1 month ago | 
newcriterion.com | John Byron Kuhner |John Derbyshire |Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |Victor Davis Hanson
One after another, orchestras are visiting Carnegie Hall, to play two or three concerts. The Cleveland Orchestra is there now, for two concerts. Tonight’s is the second. Last night’s began with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Do you remember what Robert Graves said? “The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good—in spite of all the people who say he is very good.” Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is almost a cartoon.
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1 month ago | 
newcriterion.com | John Derbyshire |Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |Victor Davis Hanson |James Penrose
Alicia de Larrocha, the late Spanish pianist, introduced the world to a great deal of Spanish music. Not just music by relatively established composers, such as Albéniz, Granados, Falla, and Turina, but also the music of the less well established: Federico Mompou, Ernesto Halffter, Óscar Esplá, et al. We had Spanish singers too, spreading Spanish songs around the world. I think of three sopranos, in particular: Victoria de los Ángeles, Montserrat Caballé, and Pilar Lorengar.
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1 month ago | 
newcriterion.com | John Byron Kuhner |John Derbyshire |Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |Victor Davis Hanson
Robert Frost has not been lucky in his biographers.
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1 month ago | 
newcriterion.com | John Derbyshire |Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |Victor Davis Hanson |James Penrose
An early highlight of Broadway’s just-underway spring season is the finely wrought family drama Purpose (at the Hayes Theater through July 6), from the forty-year-old playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. Jacobs-Jenkins has already won a mantel full of awards and had a hit with last year’s production of 2013’s Appropriate, which won him a Tony for Best Revival of a Play and which I regret having missed.
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1 month ago | 
newcriterion.com | John Derbyshire |Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |Victor Davis Hanson |James Penrose
Although he is too modest to claim the honor for himself, Roger Chickering is in many ways the dean of American scholars of modern German history. For nearly half a century, he has produced imaginative and deeply researched monographs, meticulously peeling back the complexities of a society that was both astoundingly productive and at the same time deeply troubled and troubling.
