Andrei Navrozov
Encyclopedia
Andrei Navrozov, poet and writer, was born in Moscow in 1956, grandson of the playwright Andrei Navrozov (1899–1941), son of the essayist and translator Lev Navrozov
(1928-).
with a B.A. in English, in 1978 he bought the bankrupt Yale Literary Magazine
, America’s oldest literary review in publication since 1821, for $1, personally assuming its obligations and liabilities, and continued until 1985 as the quarterly journal’s editor and publisher. In all over $1 million was raised from alumni supporters, whereupon some 16 lavishly produced and extravagantly priced issues were published, with the participation of such contributors as E. M. Cioran, Philip Larkin
, Lewis Lapham
, Henri Peyre, G. S. Fraser
, Roy Fuller
, Martin Seymour-Smith
, Ernst Gombrich
, A. L. Rowse
, Boris Goldovsky
, Annie Dillard
, William F. Buckley, Jr. and George Gilder
The magazine’s financial independence and self-styled "freethinking" incited the wrath of the University administration and other left-leaning academic elites, which the magazine’s vicious attacks on such sacred cows as the New York Times and the New York Review of Books did little to assuage. The matter ended in court, where the case of Yale v. Yale drew extensive international press coverage and was televised in a segment of CBS's 60 Minutes
.
. In 1990, a book of his English translations of the early poems of Boris Pasternak
, Second Nature, once again caused a media furore, with critics like Craig Raine
denouncing him for appropriating the Russian poet’s idiom while defenders, such as the poet’s sister Josephine Pasternak and the poet Charles Causley
, praised his lyrical audacity. A second edition of Second Nature came out in 2003.
From 1985 to 1995 Navrozov contributed nearly 1,000 articles and columns on literary, cultural and political subjects to The Spectator
, The Times
, The Daily Telegraph
and The Guardian
, as well as publishing a fiercely polemical essay on the reality of political change in the Soviet Union
entitled The Coming Order: Reflections on Sovietology and the Media. In 1993 Pan Macmillan published his autobiography, The Gingerbread Race: A Life in the Closing World Once Called Free, in which the subject of totalitarianism’s mercurial essence was further enlarged upon. Soviet-style crypto-freethinking totalitarianism and American-style pseudo-egalitarian democracy, Navrozov argues in The Gingerbread Race, had arrived at the same end by vastly different means. Using the model of a Yale secret society
, Skull and Bones
, to reveal the hidden workings of an American elite, and comparing its decision-making efficiency with the efficiency of the KGB
elite that has ruled Russia de facto since 1953 and de jure since Yuri Andropov
, Navrozov comes to the disheartening conclusion that the West’s millennial autarchy is at an end. "It is the story of a free-thinker who escapes from the frying pan of totalitarianism only to find himself in the fire of American intellectual fascism," Adam Zamoyski
commented in a review of the book in The Spectator
. "His unique experience gives his observations an edge which mere critics of ‘political correctness’ lack. His intelligence and learning endow his observations with a richness and breadth few writers can display. He has a nice sense of humour, essential for the perusal of human folly. He is also a poet, which lends his prose style and grace."
, now describing himself as "a political refugee from Russia, a cultural refugee from the United States and a gastronomic
refugee from England." After living in Rome, Florence, Venice and Palermo, he published in 2003 a book of his impressions, Italian Carousel: Scenes of Internal Exile. In 2004, a collection of verse in Russian, Strashnaya Krasota (Awful Beauty), was published in London by the last of the émigré houses, Nina Karsov. Since then Navrozov has been working on a trilogy of novels in English, entitled respectively Awful Beauty: Confessions of a Coward, Earthly Love: A Day in the Life of a Hypocrite, and Incredible Trust: When the Liar Falls Silent. Sections of the second volume have been serialised under the rubric "European Diary" in the American monthly Chronicles
, a working association with whose editor, Thomas Fleming
, Navrozov has maintained through most of the magazine’s existence, first as its Poetry Editor, then as its European correspondent, and finally as its European Editor. The quarter-century collaboration with Chronicles has led some commentators to name him, along with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
, among paleoconservatism
’s literary influences, a suggestion Navrozov dismisses as spurious, insisting, as he explains it to a correspondent in a private letter, on the writer’s "privilege of having two wings, a right and a left, which is the innate privilege of angels." Writing in a language other than his mother tongue, in the tradition of Joseph Conrad
and Vladimir Nabokov
, with every line of his prose Navrozov seeks to demonstrate that a free intellect, moving as it does above party-controlled politics and mass-produced ethics, is its own justification and the abiding aim of a writer in any epoch.
Lev Navrozov
Lev Navrozov is a Russian author, historian and polemicist and father of poet Andrei Navrozov. A leading translator of Russian texts into English under the Soviet regime, Navrozov emigrated to the United States in 1972, where he published a best-selling memoir, The Education of Lev Navrozov, and...
(1928-).
Early life
Navrozov was educated at home, evading compulsory Soviet schooling until his family’s emigration to the US in 1972, an unexpected turn of events made possible by an official Department of State invitation from President Richard NixonRichard Nixon
Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. The only president to resign the office, Nixon had previously served as a US representative and senator from California and as the 36th Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961 under...
Yale University (1978–1985)
After graduating from Yale UniversityYale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
with a B.A. in English, in 1978 he bought the bankrupt Yale Literary Magazine
Yale Literary Magazine
The Yale Literary Magazine, founded in 1836, is the oldest literary magazine in the United States and publishes poetry and fiction by Yale undergraduates twice per academic year.The magazine is published biannually...
, America’s oldest literary review in publication since 1821, for $1, personally assuming its obligations and liabilities, and continued until 1985 as the quarterly journal’s editor and publisher. In all over $1 million was raised from alumni supporters, whereupon some 16 lavishly produced and extravagantly priced issues were published, with the participation of such contributors as E. M. Cioran, Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin
Philip Arthur Larkin, CH, CBE, FRSL is widely regarded as one of the great English poets of the latter half of the twentieth century...
, Lewis Lapham
Lewis Lapham
Lewis Henry Lapham was an American entrepreneur who made a fortune consolidating smaller business in the leather industry. He was also one of the founders of Texaco Oil Company....
, Henri Peyre, G. S. Fraser
G. S. Fraser
George Sutherland Fraser was a Scottish poet, literary critic and academic. He was born in Glasgow, later moving with his family to Aberdeen. He went to the University of St. Andrews....
, Roy Fuller
Roy Fuller
Roy Broadbent Fuller was an English writer, known mostly as a poet. He was born in Failsworth, Lancashire, and brought up in Blackpool. He worked as a lawyer for a building society, serving in the Royal Navy 1941-1946.Poems was his first book of poetry. He began to write fiction also in the 1950s...
, Martin Seymour-Smith
Martin Seymour-Smith
Martin Roger Seymour-Smith was a British poet, literary critic, biographer and astrologer.Seymour-Smith was born in London and educated at Oxford University where he was editor of Isis...
, Ernst Gombrich
Ernst Gombrich
Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich, OM, CBE was an Austrian-born art historian who became naturalized British citizen in 1947. He spent most of his working life in the United Kingdom...
, A. L. Rowse
A. L. Rowse
Alfred Leslie Rowse, CH, FBA , known professionally as A. L. Rowse and to friends and family as Leslie, was a British historian from Cornwall. He is perhaps best known for his work on Elizabethan England and his poetry about Cornwall. He was also a Shakespearean scholar and biographer...
, Boris Goldovsky
Boris Goldovsky
Boris Goldovsky was a Russian conductor and broadcast commentator, active in the United States. He has been called an important "popularizer" of opera in America...
, Annie Dillard
Annie Dillard
Annie Dillard is an American author, best known for her narrative prose in both fiction and non-fiction. She has published works of poetry, essays, prose, and literary criticism, as well as two novels and one memoir. Her 1974 work Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for General...
, William F. Buckley, Jr. and George Gilder
George Gilder
George F. Gilder is an American writer, techno-utopian intellectual, Republican Party activist, and co-founder of the Discovery Institute...
The magazine’s financial independence and self-styled "freethinking" incited the wrath of the University administration and other left-leaning academic elites, which the magazine’s vicious attacks on such sacred cows as the New York Times and the New York Review of Books did little to assuage. The matter ended in court, where the case of Yale v. Yale drew extensive international press coverage and was televised in a segment of CBS's 60 Minutes
60 Minutes
60 Minutes is an American television news magazine, which has run on CBS since 1968. The program was created by producer Don Hewitt who set it apart by using a unique style of reporter-centered investigation....
.
England and freelance journalism (1985–1998)
In 1985, Navrozov moved to England, where he found employment as a freelance literary journalist, contributing to the books pages of virtually every broadsheet newspaper in Britain, and eventually becoming a British citizen. In 1986 a selection of his verse translations into Russian was published by Natalia Gorbanevskaya in the émigré KontinentKontinent
Kontinent was an émigré dissident journal which focused on the politics of the Soviet Union and its satellites. Founded in 1974 by writer Vladimir Maximov, its first editor-in-chief, it was published in German and Russian and later translated into English...
. In 1990, a book of his English translations of the early poems of Boris Pasternak
Boris Pasternak
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was a Russian language poet, novelist, and literary translator. In his native Russia, Pasternak's anthology My Sister Life, is one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language...
, Second Nature, once again caused a media furore, with critics like Craig Raine
Craig Raine
Craig Raine is an English poet and critic born in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, England. Along with Christopher Reid, he is the best-known exponent of Martian poetry.-Life:...
denouncing him for appropriating the Russian poet’s idiom while defenders, such as the poet’s sister Josephine Pasternak and the poet Charles Causley
Charles Causley
Charles Stanley Causley, CBE, FRSL was a Cornish poet, schoolmaster and writer. His work is noted for its simplicity and directness and for its associations with folklore, especially when linked to his native Cornwall....
, praised his lyrical audacity. A second edition of Second Nature came out in 2003.
From 1985 to 1995 Navrozov contributed nearly 1,000 articles and columns on literary, cultural and political subjects to The Spectator
The Spectator
The Spectator is a weekly British magazine first published on 6 July 1828. It is currently owned by David and Frederick Barclay, who also owns The Daily Telegraph. Its principal subject areas are politics and culture...
, The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
, The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph is a daily morning broadsheet newspaper distributed throughout the United Kingdom and internationally. The newspaper was founded by Arthur B...
and The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
, as well as publishing a fiercely polemical essay on the reality of political change in the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
entitled The Coming Order: Reflections on Sovietology and the Media. In 1993 Pan Macmillan published his autobiography, The Gingerbread Race: A Life in the Closing World Once Called Free, in which the subject of totalitarianism’s mercurial essence was further enlarged upon. Soviet-style crypto-freethinking totalitarianism and American-style pseudo-egalitarian democracy, Navrozov argues in The Gingerbread Race, had arrived at the same end by vastly different means. Using the model of a Yale secret society
Secret society
A secret society is a club or organization whose activities and inner functioning are concealed from non-members. The society may or may not attempt to conceal its existence. The term usually excludes covert groups, such as intelligence agencies or guerrilla insurgencies, which hide their...
, Skull and Bones
Skull and Bones
Skull and Bones is an undergraduate senior or secret society at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. It is a traditional peer society to Scroll and Key and Wolf's Head, as the three senior class 'landed societies' at Yale....
, to reveal the hidden workings of an American elite, and comparing its decision-making efficiency with the efficiency of the KGB
KGB
The KGB was the commonly used acronym for the . It was the national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991, and was the premier internal security, intelligence, and secret police organization during that time.The State Security Agency of the Republic of Belarus currently uses the...
elite that has ruled Russia de facto since 1953 and de jure since Yuri Andropov
Yuri Andropov
Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov was a Soviet politician and the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 12 November 1982 until his death fifteen months later.-Early life:...
, Navrozov comes to the disheartening conclusion that the West’s millennial autarchy is at an end. "It is the story of a free-thinker who escapes from the frying pan of totalitarianism only to find himself in the fire of American intellectual fascism," Adam Zamoyski
Adam Zamoyski
Count Adam Stefan Zamoyski is a historian and a member of the ancient Zamoyski family of Polish nobility.-Life:Zamoyski was born in New York City, but was raised in England and was educated at Downside School and The Queen's College, Oxford...
commented in a review of the book in The Spectator
The Spectator
The Spectator is a weekly British magazine first published on 6 July 1828. It is currently owned by David and Frederick Barclay, who also owns The Daily Telegraph. Its principal subject areas are politics and culture...
. "His unique experience gives his observations an edge which mere critics of ‘political correctness’ lack. His intelligence and learning endow his observations with a richness and breadth few writers can display. He has a nice sense of humour, essential for the perusal of human folly. He is also a poet, which lends his prose style and grace."
Italy and life as novelist (1998–present)
In 1998 Navrozov left Britain for ItalyItaly
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
, now describing himself as "a political refugee from Russia, a cultural refugee from the United States and a gastronomic
Gastronomy
Gastronomy is the art or science of food eating. Also, it can be defined as the study of food and culture, with a particular focus on gourmet cuisine...
refugee from England." After living in Rome, Florence, Venice and Palermo, he published in 2003 a book of his impressions, Italian Carousel: Scenes of Internal Exile. In 2004, a collection of verse in Russian, Strashnaya Krasota (Awful Beauty), was published in London by the last of the émigré houses, Nina Karsov. Since then Navrozov has been working on a trilogy of novels in English, entitled respectively Awful Beauty: Confessions of a Coward, Earthly Love: A Day in the Life of a Hypocrite, and Incredible Trust: When the Liar Falls Silent. Sections of the second volume have been serialised under the rubric "European Diary" in the American monthly Chronicles
Chronicles (magazine)
Chronicles is a U.S. monthly magazine published by the Rockford Institute. Its full current name is Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. The magazine is known for promoting anti-globalism, anti-intervention and anti-immigration stances within conservative politics, and is considered one of...
, a working association with whose editor, Thomas Fleming
Thomas Fleming
Thomas Fleming may refer to:*Thomas Fleming, Earl of Wigtown *Sir Thomas Fleming , English judge*Thomas Fleming, 2nd Baron Slane...
, Navrozov has maintained through most of the magazine’s existence, first as its Poetry Editor, then as its European correspondent, and finally as its European Editor. The quarter-century collaboration with Chronicles has led some commentators to name him, along with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was aRussian and Soviet novelist, dramatist, and historian. Through his often-suppressed writings, he helped to raise global awareness of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system – particularly in The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of...
, among paleoconservatism
Paleoconservatism
Paleoconservatism is a term for a conservative political philosophy found primarily in the United States stressing tradition, limited government, civil society, anti-colonialism, anti-corporatism and anti-federalism, along with religious, regional, national and Western identity. Chilton...
’s literary influences, a suggestion Navrozov dismisses as spurious, insisting, as he explains it to a correspondent in a private letter, on the writer’s "privilege of having two wings, a right and a left, which is the innate privilege of angels." Writing in a language other than his mother tongue, in the tradition of Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad was a Polish-born English novelist.Conrad is regarded as one of the great novelists in English, although he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties...
and Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...
, with every line of his prose Navrozov seeks to demonstrate that a free intellect, moving as it does above party-controlled politics and mass-produced ethics, is its own justification and the abiding aim of a writer in any epoch.
External links
- My Navrozov Moments - an analysis of Navrozov's views on the American university system.