WRB—Nov. 12, 2025

“light of a match”

The WRB is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the “Living Infinite,” as one of your poets has said. The WRB is the vast reservoir of Nature. The globe began with the WRB, so to speak; and who knows if it will not end with it? In it is supreme tranquility.

Links:

• In Equator, Yuri Slezkine on the influence the Soviet Adventure Library had on his life:

  Even as “faraway lands” were being transformed into places that could be found on a map, “once upon a time” turned into history that could be checked in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. One half of our reading list was Orientalist and Meridionalist, with a little Septentrionalism sprinkled in, courtesy of Jack London. The other was retrospective Occidentalism, with Walter Scott’s Highlanders, Prosper Mérimée’s Corsicans, Victor Hugo’s Jacobins, Raffaello Giovagnoli’s gladiators, and Alexandre Dumas’ musketeers, among others, turning the European past into a frontier.

  The book that brought all the threads together and wove them into a narrative that summed up the dreams of Soviet boyhood was written in the Gulag. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the journalist, translator and war veteran Robert Shtilmark was doing hard labour for anti–Soviet agitation (of uncertain description). He survived by entertaining criminals with “monstrous concoctions of Stevenson, [Émile] Gaboriau, Haggard, and Boussenard” (as one of his listeners put it). His foreman, a prisoner named Vasily Vasilevsky, promised to get him off work if he wrote an adventure novel set in a foreign country, in the distant past, and involving pirates, jewels, desert islands, kidnapped children, and a tame lion. The result was a swashbuckler set in the eighteenth century, in India, England, Spain, Greece, Italy, Africa and the South Seas. Shtilmark drew the line at the tame lion, and after much persuading, Vasilevsky settled for a large dog.

  [It’s good to know that Scheherazade could have survived in our world too. And I feel pretty confident that, if there were an easy way to get put in charge of a submarine, the abridged version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea I read when I was very young would have had a great impact on my life. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In The Baffler,

  Robert Rubsam
  reviews the new essay collection from Jenny Erpenbeck (Things That Disappear, translated from the German by Kurt Beals, October) [The Upcoming book in WRB—Oct. 4, 2025.]:

  “Things disappear,” says Erpenbeck, “when they are deprived of their means of existence.” Visiting Berlin today, you cannot find Erpenbeck’s jagged ruins and cleared spaces. East German structures have transformed into nightclubs and art galleries, and prewar wrecks have all been rehabilitated, memorialized, or demolished. Their long horizons and weedy gaps have been replaced with faux-classical Stimmannian structures, whose low eves and sandstone facades elide the architectural movements of the twentieth century. Rather than the active, mutable space of the vacant lot, the derelict building, the ruin, you have the strictly policed sites of “memory culture,” which run a border wall between what can be respectably mourned and what must be forgotten.

  In one of the essays in the collection, Erpenbeck remarks that “the word disappear has something active at its core,” that language itself contains the mechanisms for dematerialization and forgetting. Yet her own words are themselves a kind of bulwark, a catalog of the minor details and inconsequential impressions that make up the course of a private life. When she recalls the plastic animals once produced at the factory in Zschopau, the sunset view from across a cleared lot, the weight of a metal stool in her hand, she is recalling an entire network of social existence which is slowly being ground into dust. They are her fragments, shored up against forgetting. And in reading, they become ours too.

  [I think Peter Brown says somewhere—I can’t find it—that once Christians in late antiquity no longer saw paganism as a live threat they were content to let pagan material culture hang around as a relic from a defeated past. If it still poses a threat those considerations become much more fraught. —Steve]

• In the local Post, Jess Keiser reviews a Lovecraftian novel of the internet (There Is No Antimemetics Division, by qntm, November 11):

  As a result, There Is No Antimemetics Division is filled, bursting, with paperwork: reports, memos, sticky notes, and even desperate last messages hastily scratched onto the walls of dreary corporate corridors. The novel itself alternates between straightforward narrative chapters and sections which reproduce files from the Organization’s archives about nightmarish creatures and reality-rending anomalies. Of course, these inserted documents are dense with redactions. Thumb through the novel’s pages and you’ll soon notice sweeping, blacked-out voids—the censor’s pen is the original anti-meme, after all—effacing wide swaths of the story, erasing vital information, leaving behind only enticing clues. One of Hughes’ great formal tricks is to make the redaction serve the same purpose as the shadows and fog of the traditional Gothic novel or Weird tale: Lurking behind those opacities are horrors too great for the human mind to bear.

  [Filling a horror story with paperwork goes back to Dracula, at least, and if someone wanted to try their hand at redacting large portions of that as a kind of erasure poetry I would be intrigued to see the result. —Steve]

[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:

• Sally Rooney’s marriage plots without marriage

• Dreams of literary glamour

• A Poem by Li Po and the First World War

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]