The portraits that follow are from a large number of photographs recently recovered from sealed archives in Moscow, some—rumor has it—from a cache in the bottom of an elevator shaft. Five of those that follow, Akhmatova, Chekhov (with dog), Nabokov, Pasternak (with book), and Tolstoy (on horseback) are from a volume entitled The Russian Century, published early last year by Random House. Seven photographs from that research, which were not incorporated in The Russian Century, are published here for the first time: Bulgakov, Bunin , Eisenstein (in a group with Pasternak and Mayakovski), Gorki, Mayakovski, Nabokov (with mother and sister), Tolstoy (with Chekhov), and Yesenin. The photographs of Andreyev, Babel, and Kharms were supplied by the writers who did the texts on them. The photograph of Dostoyevsky is from the Bettmann archives. Writers who were thought to have an especial affinity with particular Russian authors were asked to provide the accompanying texts. We are immensely in their debt for their cooperation.

John Hall Wheelock (1886-1978) published his first poem in 1900, when he was fourteen. He died seventy-eight years later, with fifteen books of poetry to his name. As an artist, his work was modestly esteemed, in part because the modernist movement supplanted his appeal as a traditional, conservative poet. As an editor, his legacy is more easily appraised. 

Paris is a big city, in the sense that London and New York are big cities, and that Rome is a village, Los Angeles a collection of villages and Zürich a backwater.

A reckless friend defines a big city as a place where there are blacks, tall buildings and you can stay up all night. By that definition Paris is deficient in tall buildings; although President Pompidou had a scheme in the sixties and early seventies to fill Paris with skyscrapers, he succeeded only in marring the historic skyline with the faulty towers of a branch university, Paris VII at Jussieu (which was recently closed because it was copiously insulated with asbestos), the appalling Tour Montparnasse—and the bleak wasteland of the office district, La Défense.

One of our neighbors is the famous couturier Azzedine Alaïa, the minuscule “architect of the body” as he’s often called because he creates his garments directly on his models, whereas someone like Christian LaCroix dashes off a sketch which he tosses at a trained team of seamstresses who interpret and realize even his most far-fetched inspirations. Alaïa works sometimes late into the night, his mouth full of pins, as he drapes and pulls and turns and twists and dances around the dais like Pygmalion dressing an already transformed and fully alive Galatea.

We motor through the clammy mists veiling the coastline. Visibility comes and goes but mostly goes, forcing us to home by sound—the dull thud and whoosh of waves, the piping calls of black guillemots, or sea pigeons, as the local Newfoundlanders call them. We bump in an inflatable Zodiac through shallows and around rocky shoals, taking slaps of water aboard. 

Natalie Clifford Barney, who was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1876 and who died in Paris in 1972 at the age of 95, was a legendary figure in France but almost unknown in her native land. She is the Amazone to whom Remy de Gourmont addressed his Lettres à l’Amazone, she appears as a character in half a dozen works of fiction, and her name turns up in scores of memoirs. 

In his various reminiscences about the early twenties Hemingway recalls with grim satisfaction how difficult it was to get his stories accepted. One persistent memory was associated with the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, where he lived when he returned to Paris from Canada in 1924 after quitting his newspaper job.

Kenneth Noland’s name is synonymous with a particular kind of American abstraction—one based on the potency of color, rooted in the belief that relationships of hues, like music, can directly and wordlessly stir our deepest emotional and intellectual reserves. Noland’s name stands, too, for pictures with lucid, near-geometric formats—images that ring changes on frontal, symmetrical, deceptively simple compositions, brought to life by seductive color. Probably the best known of these are the Circle paintings—unabashedly beautiful concentric rings of disembodied hues—with which he first announced himself as a painter to be reckoned with, four decades ago.

In my (Tr. Note l.) room. No. 13 on the fifth floor of the Hotel Carcassonne at 24 Rue Mouffetard, to the right of the entrance door, between the stove and the sink, stands a table that VERA painted blue one day to surprise me. I have set out here to sec what the objects on a section of this table (which I could have made into a snare-picture) (see Appendix II) might suggest to me, what they might spontaneously awaken in me in describing them: the way SHERLOCK HOLMES, starting out with a single object, could solve a crime; (see Appendix III) or historians, after centuries, were able to reconstitute a whole epoch from the most famous fixation in history, Pompeii.

The correspondence between James Laughlin and William Carlos Williams began late in 1933 at the instigation of their mutual friend, Ezra Pound. At the age of nineteen, Laughlin had met Pound in Rapallo, Italy, where he spent several months on a leave of absence from Harvard at Pound’s "Ezuversity,” a sort of informal seminar conducted by the poet.