To the Hermitage
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- CHF 5.00
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- CHF 5.00
Description de l’éditeur
To the Hermitage tells two stories. The first is of the narrator, a novelist, on a trip to Stockholm and Russia for an academic seminar called the Diderot Project. The second takes place two hundred years earlier and recreates the journey the French philosopher Denis Diderot made to Russia at the invitation of Catherine the Great, a woman whose influence could change the path of history . . .
Malcolm Bradbury’s last novel is rich with his satirical wit, but it is also deeply personal and weaves a wonderfully wry self-portrait.
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.
