“... about the Russian canon remain complicated. She loves Gogol and early Chekhov. She hates Gorky and Tolstoy (‘a graphomaniac’). She admits few influences and even fewer heirs (she says she hasn’t heard of Vladimir Sorokin or Victor Pelevin). Asked to name five great novels, she refused: ‘I’m not a reader, I’m a writer.’Her work has its origins in ...”

“... scorn for the idea that there could be a society free of selfishness and the wish to dominate. Nikolai Bukharin, the theoretician of world Communism, supposed that a war between two Communist states was ‘an impossibility by definition’. Niebuhr quotes the Bukharin axiom and comments that such self-overcoming is improbable for Communism and equally ...”

“... for an infusion of Old Church Slavonic, the archaic tongue of the Orthodox liturgy; others, led by Nikolai Karamzin (Russia’s first professional writer, Hoogenboom calls him), embraced the influence of French, German and English literature and sought a more conversational form of prose. Pushkin sided with Karamzin, but came to feel his predecessor was too ...”