Recent stories of note:
“Met Museum Plans Major Raphael Exhibition for 2026”
Maximilíano Durón, ARTnews
From March 29 to June 26, 2026, the Metropolitan Museum of Art will host “Raphael: Sublime Poetry.” The show is entrusted to the tried-and-tested hands of Carmen Bambach, who curated the Met’s much-acclaimed Michelangelo exhibition in 2017 (reviewed by James Hankins in the December 2017 issue of The New Criterion). The show will seek to represent the entirety of Raphael’s artistic output, from paintings to drawings to tapestries, and everything in between. The show is the latest proof that Raphaelite mania is not subsiding: just three years ago, the National Gallery in London opened a blockbuster show dedicated to Urbino’s greatest son, similarly focused on the whole of the artist’s short but inestimably brilliant career.
“A Question of Purpose: On Translating Russian Literature”
Gary Saul Morson, The Hedgehog Review
Since the days of Constance Garnett, who first opened up the vast treasure trove of Russian classics to the Anglophone world at the turn of the century, no translators of Russian literature have garnered as much fame and praise as the husband-and-wife duo Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. They are one of only three translators who have won the prestigious PEN Translation Prize twice, once for Brothers Karamazov (reviewed by Vasily Rudich in the March 1991 issue of The New Criterion) and again for Anna Karenina (2002). And yet, as Morson convincingly argues, this critical acclaim is largely unwarranted. In seeking to reproduce the original Russian word order and specific Russian idioms at all cost, Pevear and Volokhonsky not only give the impression of a clunky and unidiomatic sounding text, but also bungle and confuse key phrases and ideas. For those of us who haven’t yet canceled Dostoevsky, revised versions of Garnett’s translations are a much safer bet than Pevear and Volokhonsky’s renditions.
“The Origins of the West”
Max Skjönsberg, Law & Liberty
In recent years, Western academic discourse has been characterized by a squeamishness bordering on denialism around any notion of a “Western civilization” (see, for instance, Josephine Quinn’s recent work How the World Made the West). Georgios Varouxakis’s new book, titled The West: The History of an Idea, offers a much-needed refresher in what we talk about when we talk about the West. As Max Skjönsberg points out in his review, Varouxakis’s most important contribution to the debate about the legitimacy of a united or coherent “West” is to decouple the concept from the racial undertones that many now hear in the word. Varouxakis demonstrates that the idea of the West originated in the early nineteenth century as a shorthand to differentiate the old established European nations from the rising superpower in the east, Imperial Russia. It was the Slavic threat, later morphing into the Red Menace and now re-emerging as Russian revanchism, that has been the glue binding the West together, and not any notion of white racial superiority.
