Christopher Tayler

‘Leave my brain alone,’ the dorky hero says in Peep Show, a Channel 4 sitcom, when mental fitness comes up: ‘I get my brain training from Sudoku and Alain de Botton’s weekly podcasts.’ In truth, the author of How Proust Can Change Your Life doesn’t do a weekly podcast, but his admirers could be forgiven for taking the School of Life, a boutique enterprise...

Turgenev could be read in English from 1855, Tolstoy had British and American disciples, and Dostoevsky was, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s view, ‘a devil of a swell, to be sure’. But the English-speaking world’s received ideas about Russian literature were mostly laid down in the 1910s and 1920s, the great age of Western interest in the Russian soul – ‘its passion, its tumult, its astonishing medley of beauty and vileness’, as Virginia Woolf put it. Though there were some who mocked the craze for transplanted Russian soul-speak, most handbooks for fledgling Russophiles 100 years ago took it for granted that readers needed briefing on the paradox-filled Slavic temperament. These old-school interpreters of the Russian spirit would not have felt at home in the intellectual world Elif Batuman comes from.

A coincidence: I wrote the first page of ‘It’ on St Patrick’s Day with Irish pipers tuning up down in the street 12 floors beneath. In the parade along 5th Avenue they carried banner portraits of Sean McDermott, Kevin Barry and, no doubt, other martyrs. I didn’t stay long because the wind was bitter, the pavement covered in slush and my bones frozen to the marrow....