Igor Torbakov

Apr 8, 2024 | eurozine.com | Igor Torbakov |Kirill Rogov

When intellectuals and politicians start talking obsessively about their country’s great ‘originality’, ‘special path’ and a ‘unique mission in the world’, it’s a sure sign they’re facing mounting problems in forging a modern democratic polity, civic nation and respectable international identity. Contemporary Russia is a case in point.

Mar 7, 2024 | letraslibres.com | Igor Torbakov |Enrique Serna |Ernesto Diezmartínez |David Rieff

Se llora a Alexei Navalni como el político más audaz, sofisticado y occidental de Rusia. Sin embargo, la lucha política de Navalni contra la tiranía, que terminó en una colonia penal del Ártico en lo que parece un asesinato encargado por el Estado, hace que su “vida y destino” sean muy rusos: parte de una tradición de desafío moral contra la autocracia cruel y falaz. Navalni habría sido un político de éxito en un país democrático.

Feb 20, 2024 | eurozine.com | Igor Torbakov

Alexei Navalny is being mourned as Russia’s most daring, sophisticated and Western-looking politician. Yet Navalny’s political struggle with tyranny, which ended in an Arctic penal colony in what looks like state-sponsored murder, makes his ‘life and fate’ very Russian – part of a tradition of moral defiance against cruel and deceitful autocracy. A fated opponentNavalny would have been a successful politician in a democratic country.

Jun 21, 2023 | publicseminar.org | Evangeline Riddiford Graham |Geoffrey Kurtz |Mitchell Abidor |Igor Torbakov

In Episode 9 of Multi-Verse, poet J. Mae Barizo reads and discusses her poem “Sunday Women on Malcolm X Boulevard.” Barizo explores the rhythms of the body, wildfires near and far, and the intimate power of the couplet, in a conversation with host Evangeline Riddiford Graham. “Sunday Women on Malcolm X Boulevard” is part of J. Mae Barizo’s second poetry collection, Tender Machines, published in May 2023 with Tupelo Press.

May 16, 2023 | publicseminar.org | Geoffrey Kurtz |Evangeline Riddiford Graham |Mitchell Abidor |Igor Torbakov

Bernard Vaillant, Socrates Looking in a Mirror (c. 17th century). Public domainThe most telling sentence in Patrick J. Deneen’s new book, Regime Change (Sentinel, June 2023), might be its last one.