To the Hermitage
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- 4,99 €
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- 4,99 €
Publisher Description
To the Hermitage tells two tales: a contemporary story of our narrator, a novelist, who has been invited to Stockholm and then to Russia to take part in what is enigmatically referred to as the Diderot Project, and one set two hundred years earlier in which Bradbury brilliantly recreates Diderot’s journey to Russia to entertain and enlighten the mind of that powerful monarch, Catherine the Great.
Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.
‘To the Hermitage reads like a love letter to the life of the mind from a man who, in his work as a writer, critic, academic and teacher, has done much to contribute to that dizzying circulation of ideas which is so richly celebrated here’ The Independent on Sunday
‘A charming, engaging, witty, amusing, playful, reflective and informative book by a writer who is in championship-winning form’ The Sunday Express
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The late Bradbury (Eating People Is Wrong; Doctor Criminale), a noted teacher and novelist, achieves a striking and effective blend of past and present, literary sleuthing and travelogue in this, his last novel. It weaves two narratives: the first concerns an English professor who goes with a group of fellow academics to St. Petersburg on the Diderot Project (a conference devoted to the great French philosopher and contemporary of Voltaire), just as Yeltsin's countercoup in Moscow is coming to a climax. It is also the wonderfully researched and touching story of how Catherine the Great, ever eager to be thought of as a queen of enlightenment, invited Diderot to her palace, the Hermitage, for daily discussions on the nature of the late-18th-century world. A motley collection of contemporary scholars have their own reasons for their pilgrimage, which is much enlivened by academic bickering and inserted conference papers that venture into beguiling byways of history. The professor encounters an elderly librarian who has spent her life trying to organize the unruly collection of Diderot papers amid the rigors of Soviet life; in her, Bradbury has created a deeply poignant character sketch. The windup of the historical segment is no less delightful, bringing Diderot and Voltaire together and offering the piquant suggestion that the plans for a Russian constitution, which Diderot failed to interest Catherine in, became the basis for our own Constitution. The book is overextended, but it is also lively, thought provoking and, in its portrait of contemporary Russia, vividly chilling. For patient readers of a scholarly inclination and with a liking for the stranger corners of history, this will be a treat; many will unfortunately find the length and density daunting.
