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[...] It is, physically and mentally, well-nigh impossible to read those many hundreds of pages. And yet. As one forces oneself to leaf through this or that passage, the flashes of stylistic genius, of verbal incandescence strike one as might a brusque shiver of light across the sheen of a cesspool…

So it is with the great Russian writers. Their cries for liberation, their appeals to the drowsy conscience of the West are strident and genuine. But they are not always meant to be heard or anwered in any straightforward guise. Solutions can come only from within, from an inwardness with singular …

Guy Davenport is faithful to Ezra Pound's injunction that prose ought to be at least as well crafted as verse. He is a master of subtle pace. Seemingly short sentences and fragmentary phrases open, via unexpected commas, into sequences as opulent as Japanese paper blossoms dropped in clear water. […

[...] It is better to have been hallucinated by justice than to have been awakened to junk food. [...]

When Marx, in the famous 1844 manuscripts, imagined a society in which love and solidarity, rather than money and competitive hatreds, would be exchanged among human beings, he was simply rephrasing the summons to transcendence of Jeremiah, of Amos, and of the Gospels. When he urged a kingdom of so…