When The Cherry Orchard premiered in Moscow in 1904, Chekhov called it a comedy with elements of farce. The first director, Konstantin Stanislavski, staged it as a tragedy. This is the Shakespearean ...

Watch Lionel Shriver deliver the Eighth Annual Circle Lecture, “What do progressives really want?” A version of the remarks appear in the November 2026 issue of The New Criterion.

In a year of much discussion of the Man of Twists and Turns, it was fitting that the Orchestra of the Greek National Opera ...

In a Medea, you need a Medea, for sure. Few title roles are as crucial. Still, there is no one more important in this opera than the conductor. He (or she) determines the character of a performance: ...

On Riccardo Muti and the fate of the Villa Verdi.

The book begins with Rowe’s visit to a fête, which revives happy memories of his youth. He stops by gift booths, plays ...

When did World War I begin? In his new book The Blood-Dimmed Tide: Central Europe’s Long Great War, 1905–1921, Jesse Kauffman, a history professor at Eastern Michigan University, provides a novel ...

T he Red Army captain Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn began to rethink his convictions after his arrest on February 9, 1945. As he gradually reconsidered his enthusiastic devotion to Soviet Marxism, he also ...

The lights, we must never forget, can always go out. The shared store of information that a culture values is not preserved by any divine right; with just a few wrong turns taken, the entirety of its ...

Long ago, before contemporary art became chic and commanded attention year-round, galleries either closed in August or weathered the summer doldrums by installing group shows—an expedient default ...

The Architecture of Pleasure” is a bold subtitle for a book. What possibilities it conjures up! For starters, there are the bagnios of Shakespearean England; the dome decreed by Kublai Khan; and the ...

We are reasonably confident that the Nobel Prizes in the sciences are still worth something. We are not so sure about the prizes for literature and, especially, the Norwegian special, the so-called ...