A Park for all Seasons
Terrace of Parc Joly An American in France Les Français au Nouveau Monde The Parc Joly, Semur-en-Auxios, Cote d’Or, France, renders me nostalgic. I am a volunteer, my specialty mortarless stone wall construction. In 1965, the summer before I left for the university, I...
When is it as good as it can be?
I have finished composing novel # 5, the working title Resurrection, the last book in The Long War series. These five novels follow two men and two women, American and Russian, from their mid-teens to a denouement during the breakup of Yugoslavia. They...
The Netherlands, 2-12 February 2024
Dutch friends, Dick S. and Sandra D., offered Patrice and me their country house in Middelharnis. It was a ‘two birds with one stone’ opportunity. We had finished our move from the apartment in Semur-en-Auxios to the farmhouse in Chevigny thus we could count as a...
Plitvice Lakes, Croatia
Grabovac, Plitvice Lakes, and a novel During the week 18-24 October 2023 Patrice and I visited Croatia’s Plitvice Lakes region to 1). take a one-week vacation and 2) to ‘ground truth’ a chase scene which concludes my fifth novel, Resurrection. Sixteen Lakes, the...
The Robert Olen Butler with Clara Herrera Visit Semur-en-Auxios
Robert & Robert at Le Relais Bernard Loiseau in Saulieu, France and Clara Robert Olen, my buddy of several decades, and Clara Herrera visited Patrice and me in France ( FTR 15-22 August 2023). They first spent a week in Paris, where we joined them for two days,...Featured Books
Thirteen Coats
Evgenii Belodubrovskii's Thirteen Coats is a recollection and meditation on Leningrad–St. Petersburg from his birth in 1941 on the eve of the German invasion to the present.
Russia's twentieth century traumas––two world wars and the long civil war that endured from the October Revolution in 1918 until Stalin's death in1953 (we can include the collectivization of agriculture, the Great Terror and Gulag as part of this long civil war).
Numbers empty tragedy of meaning. Stalin noted that one death is a tragedy, but ten thousand deaths is a statistic. If there is a big picture, perhaps it is contained within the pages of The Black Book of Communism that enumerates the tens of millions murdered in the name of that twentieth century religion of Communism.
If there is any sense to be made of the madness, it will be in the single individual story. Longevity tables suggest an American will on average live ninety-three years. Self-medicating trauma with alcohol, drugs and tobacco, my Russian male cohort has now been dead ten years, his statistical lifespan fifty-three years. Memorial is a Russian movement to tell the story of Russia's twentieth century tragedy one death and one story at a time. Here, perhaps, there is some hope for Russia's recovery rather than in longing for its 'Black Book' greatness.
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