“What even is a childhood diary—for whom do we keep it?”

Simon Renard de Saint-André, Vanitas, c. 1660.   2. Adriaen van Utrecht, Vanitas Still Life with Flowers and Skull, 1642.   3. Aelbert Jansz. van der Schoor, Vanitas Still Life, c. 1640–1672.*   4. Hendrick An…

An epilogue. 10:35 P.M. I spot Amelia and Anne in the crowd walking back to the ferry. Amelia thinks that Stepan Trofimovich must really have been supposed to look like Marx: when he was dying in Varvara Petrovna’s arms, that was nascent Marxism be…

The final installment of a four-part review. 5:56 P.M. Another break. As sometimes happens with people under duress, our biological systems have warped into synch and pretty much all 400-odd culture lovers seem to have to pee this time. “Five-m…

Part three of a four-part review. 3:15 P.M. “If you knew all the yams I have to tell them,” one character says, according to the supertitles. I am briefly interested, until I realize they are yarns and not yams. Pyotr is trying to recruit Nikola…

Part two of a four-part review. 11:05 A.M. The play starts. I’m briefly excited. It’s strange to see Dostoevsky’s weird, garrulous narrator—weird, in the book, because he knows all this stuff he couldn’t possibly know, and narrates in first…

A review in four parts.9:15 A.M. Sitting in a taxi on the FDR Drive, I wonder how life has brought me to this point. I’m headed for a ferry to take me to a warehouse on Governor’s Island to watch a twelve-hour staging of Dostoevsky’s Demons, in Itali…