Nightingales

John Bayley

  • Nightingale Fever: Russian Poets in Revolution by Ronald Hingley
    Weidenfeld, 269 pp, £12.95, January 1982, ISBN 0 297 77902 8
  • Russian Writers and Soviet Society 1917-1978 by Ronald Hingley
    Methuen, 296 pp, £4.95, June 1981, ISBN 0 416 31390 6
  • The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Russia and the Soviet Union edited by Archie Brown
    Cambridge, 492 pp, £18.50, February 1982, ISBN 0 521 23169 8
  • ‘Novy Mir’: A Case-Study in the Politics of Literature 1952-1958 by Edith Frankel
    Cambridge, 206 pp, £19.50, November 1981, ISBN 0 521 23438 7

Consciousness has to live, at least notionally, by extremes. It is by turns enthusiastic and cynical, believes and disbelieves. It wants to be snug and comfortable, but its peak moments, when it feels most alive, come out of crisis and extremes – illness, accident, bereavement, jealousy, longing. ‘I wouldn’t have missed it for anything,’ it will say to itself about a quarrel or a war, some episode of general misery.

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