In this week’s TLS – A note from the History editor

On the face of
it, the nineteenth-century Russian writer Nikolai Leskov and the early
twentieth-century American writer Sherwood Anderson would seem to have very
little in common. Leskov came from “a long line of priests”, and his work was
inspired by the traditions of Russian orthodoxy. Anderson was a “hardworking
businessman” who, according to literary legend, walked out of his office at a
paint factory one day, and devoted the rest of his life to writing “fables of
estrangement”. But both A. N. Wilson, reviewing new translations of Leskov’s
stories, and Michael Dirda, on a Library of America edition of Anderson, see a
connection between their subjects and Anton Chekhov. It was Leskov who prepared
the ground for Chekhov, Wilson argues. But where Chekhov’s characters seem
universal types, Leskov’s remain “pungently” Russian. Dirda sees Anderson
himself as an equivalent “John the Baptist” figure in the development of the
American short story, foreshadowing William Faulkner, for example, who declared
that Anderson was “the father of my generation of American writers”. Anderson’s
“distinctive tenderness for his characters, despite all their flaws and
foibles” reminds Dirda not of American forebears, however, but of Russian ones:
Turgenev – and Chekhov.

In an age of
academic specialization, history books that establish a new orthodoxy across a
great swathe of time and distance are increasingly rare. But Theodore K. Rabb
believes that Geoffrey Parker’s magnum opus, Global Crisis, does precisely
that. Parker makes a “monumental statement about the nature of
seventeenth-century history”, which sets the “General Crisis” of that period
firmly at the centre of its history. If the “essential background” is the
Little Ice Age, “misguided policy decisions” of leaders across the globe
account for the century’s “world-wide agonies”.

In Commentary,
Mark Davies offers an intriguing new candidate as the model for Lewis Carroll’s
(and John Tenniel’s) Mad Hatter.

 

David Horspool