To the Hermitage by Malcolm Bradbury

To the Hermitage Reviews

• 
  Helen

  This is one of those books which is pretty hard to describe; because while there is a plot of sorts it's not a story you're reading for its page-turning action sequences. It's Bradbury's words, the dialogue and the descriptions, which make this book so brilliant. A book which is essentially about a philosopher and a boat trip could be so very dry; but Bradbury's writing is lively and humorous and really, just beautiful. I can't pay it any compliment higher than that.
  
  It begins with the lines,
  
  "This is (I suppose) a story. It draws a great deal on history, but as history is the lies the present tells in order to make sense of the past I have improved it where necessary."
  
  That should really tell you everything you need to know about this book.
  
  It also took me an extraordinarily long time to read - I'd usually devour a book this size in maybe three days, tops - but it was just so dense, in terms of information. I spent a hell of a lot of time with my good friend Wikipedia looking up places and people. Actually, saying that will probably turn most people of reading it so I guess if history and geography and philosophy and political theory don't excite you this might not be the book for you.
  
  But if history and geography and philosophy and political theory do excite you then hold on to your hats, ladies and gentlemen.
• 
  Jim Leckband

  My impressions of John Updike and Saul Bellow went down a little when I learned from recent biographies that they basically wrote their lives into their books - friends, lovers, affairs and etc. Which isn't totally fair of me, but when reading Updike's Bech stories where the author writes about the junkets he takes, it is obvious that Updike just dramatized around his experiences. Do I dock points from a painter because they paint a landscape in front of them? No, but for a writer it just seems lazier and almost like they are putting one over.
  
  This doesn't happen with "To The Hermitage". The book is divided into opposing sections "Now" and "Then", both involving the French encyclopediast Denis Diderot. The "Now" has an older novelist going on an academic cruise to St. Petersburg called the "Diderot Project". The "Then" has Diderot going to St. Petersburg to enlighten the Tsarina Catherine.
  
  When I started reading the "Now" sections, I was afraid I was going to be in "Bech" territory. The specificity of the protagonist to the characteristics of the author were apparent. But Bradbury didn't let this get in his or my way - his writing style is very engaging and witty. Also he is going after bigger game than a comedy/tragedy of manners that Updike and sometimes Bellow provide.
  
  Bradbury is interested in the philosophy of reason - what are its limits and what are its consequences. Diderot's Encyclopedia was the embodiment of the Age of Enlightenment - a huge undertaking to display what is known. Which is a *very* political act. As the present age has been reminded of in the last couple of years - "what is known" leads to things that need to be acted upon. In Diderot's case - historians have intimated that the Age of Enlightenment was a direct cause to the Revolutionary age to follow.
  
  If you have people questioning the Right of Kings, or even creating an environment of "questioning" - then Kings and Countries can fall. This is what happens in the "Now" section, taking place during the 1993 attempted coup against Yeltsin. By 1993 the Russian people felt freer in questioning and would not allow a retrenchment back into the totalitarian dark ages. The events of the coup form a counterpoint to the discussions of Diderot taking place amongst the conference attendees. But only in the background - they are Westerners and feel smug that "It Can't Happen Here" - and the cruise will end up back in Sweden no matter what.
  
  In the "Then" sections, we hear Diderot directly in his conversations with Catherine in the Hermitage - where the house rules are that there are no boundaries and that Diderot won't have his head cut off for anything said between them that in other circumstances would. This is crucial because it highlights the prime issue between the Age of Monarchy and modern times. Diderot is trying to get Catherine to see that the consequences of enlightenment is coming and she needs to be in front of it - which is a dangerous thing to say to a despot. No longer will "Because I say so" be all that it takes - the power resulting from a class of people not beholden to the crown (i.e. industry, finance and the resulting middle class/bourgeoisie) will make that impossible in the long run.
  
  Of course it so interesting to read this in our present environment where King Canute and his party have determined that Global Warming is a hoax, that the Constitution is a hoax, and that bankrupting the social contract is God's work. They will see that the problem is that the tides do not listen to Canute and though Galileo could be silenced, yet it moves.
• 
  Genia Lukin

  To The Hermitage describes the journey of several scholars - and artisans, and artists, and really obnoxious characters - after the library and life of Denis Diderot, the creator of the Encyclopedia. On a second track, labelled eponymously as (THEN) it shows the journey of said Diderot to St. Petersburg, his encounters with Catherine the Great, and his rather disappointed return.
  
  This book could be a nice, historical adventure. Sort of like a hot-dog with some intellectual Dijon mustard on top. Instead, what you get is the sort of meal they serve in fantastically ultra-moderne restaurants, of three peas and a dry breadstick arrayed on a plate to demonstrate the existential uncertainty of our daily lives and the synthetic nature of our provisions. Basically, the book is so meta that it drains the history out of the historical parts, and the interest out of the contemporary ones. It infects Diderot with concepts and philosophies endemic only to the modern man, depriving him of his own identity as a man of the Enlightenment. It puts in his mouth long discourses about the unreasonability of reason. These are comments more appropriate to the horribly post-post-everything professor in the other half of the book, rather than to Diderot, who almost embodied the Enlightenment and its values.
  
  The bleeding of modernity into historical fiction has always been a bit of a pet peeve of mine; this tendency to attribute to people from our past the thought processes of our own conception of reality - a weird sort of backward moral absolutism - deprives them of their own identities, and simply turns them into mirrors for our own ideas, our own concepts. In a word, rather boring, on the whole.
  
  The second major problem the book had was the inability to make up its mind as to what it is. The modern parts were rife with satire, which in places was actually very funny, but the book was not really attempting to be satirical in its majority, so the Absurdist quality of it was simply an oddity amid the serious tone it otherwise tried to adapt. Basically, it tried to be funny while being taken seriously, and tried to stuff our heads with serious philosophy while taking episodes to surreal levels of absurdity. It's not unknown in fiction, but I didn't feel the author was terribly good at it.
  
  The thirs problem, serving as background for these two, is the sometimes odd, sometimes plain nonexistent, characterisation the author gives us. It is apparently a common trend of modern fiction to write caricatures - a sort of abstract sketch of people, cubist representations - instead of real characters, and this book is full of them. Perhaps they attempt to serve as illustrations of the parody-like nature of the present, who knows? The past doesn't really contribute to narrative reliability, as Diderot boasts of having "made", "set up" or "invented" every single one of the thinkers and artists of the time; Falconet is a mediocre sculptor who came cheap till Diderot recommended him; Caron do Beaumarchais was just an upstart watchmaker till Diderot wrote about him; Rousseau was a sentimental fool till Diderot made him a contributor to his Encyclopedia... Really.
  
  Perhaps the worst bit about the book is that it's not actually poorly written, though it's immensely self-indulgent - the narrator (and the author, for whom he is a mouthpiece)plays with alliterations on an absolutely atrocious scale - and it begins as an entertaining read, thus building up the reader's expectations for something much better, making the plunge all the more regrettable.
• 
  Nancy Oakes

  There is so much to this book that I believe it will require another reading. If you're at all interested in two of my favorite topics -- the Enlightenment philosophy of reason and postmodernism -- then you will absolutely LOVE this book. It is so good and often funny in a very witty, sarcastic manner.
  
  In one timeline, Denis Diderot, the brilliant Enlightenment philosopher/author (the author of the famous Encyclopeda (go find this on the internet; it is a fascinating topic) has been invited and has put off several times an invitation to visit Empress Catherine the Great at her newly-built Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia. She meets with him each afternoon; she has decided she wants to be an enlightened ruler, but the more Diderot discusses how an enlightened ruler should rule, she counters with the fact that if she followed his way of thinking, she'd be assassinated. To me the scenes (told along side in parallel fashion to a modern journey to St. Petersburg) set at the time of Catherine the Great were the best -- I couldn't wait until the chapter reading "then."
  
  A second journey to St. Petersburg is taking place, ironically, the Diderot project celebrating the age of reason is taking place in Russia just as the last vestiges of the Old Guard Communists are trying to get Yeltsin out of power, staging their well-publicized coup. It seems that the participants of the Diderot project are going to the Hermitage in search of Diderot's works which were bought and shipped in full to Catherine the Great. However, what really happens on the way to Russia and once in Russia are vastly different.
  
  There is a lot written on this book; I will tell you that I enjoyed it very much but I took a long time to get through it and have copious notes which I will have to go through here shortly. Not for an everyday kind of read, but well worth sticking to it through the 500+ pages.
  
• 
  Realini

  To The Hermitage by Malcolm Bradbury, author of the acclaimed The History Man
  http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/u...
  10 out of 10
  
  
  Malcolm Bradbury has written some wonderful books, among them The History Man
  http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/06/h... and To The Hermitage has history again at the center, where we have quite a large number of characters participating in a remarkable saga, from Denis Diderot – the one that has left posterity papers, treatises, notes, manuals on almost any conceivable subject, from trade, politics to philosophy, creating cities, universities, parliaments – to Catherine the Great – Empress Autocratix, a very complex figure, perhaps the most advanced leader of her age, and not just of that time, a protector of the philosophers, buyer of a massive gallery of art, builder of The Hermitage and so much more – Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and a paraphernalia of characters appear in these pages, diva, diplomat, carpenter, trade unionist, professors, and maybe some alter ego of Malcolm Bradbury himself…
  
  Two stories develop in parallel, with the narrator travelling first to Sweden and from there to Sankt Petersburg, during the clash between Boris Yeltsin and the reactionaries that wanted to bring back the old communist regime – which is now in many ways back in top form, under the new despot and czar, Putin the invader of Ukraine, the bloody killer that executes his opponents and/or puts them in jail, as is the case for valiant Alexei Navalny, in the manner of Ivan the Terrible – and one important segment of the narrative will have us witness what is happening in Moscow, using the lens of the media covering the events.
  With the war in Ukraine and the atrocities committed by Putin and his bands of killers, it seems inappropriate to read an opus that takes part in Russia, for the most part, and indeed, this could well be the reason why I have enjoyed this novel less than the brilliant, hilarious Rates of Exchange
  http://realini.blogspot.com/2021/04/r... which happens in Slaka, not the USSR, and is often cathartic, but from The Hermitage, we can learn so many things about the Russians.
  
  Among the intakes would be the look at their history, the fact that they have had so many tyrants, lunatics and sadists really, ruling over them, and this is a people that has seen so much abuse, torture, assassinations, famine, poverty and suffering that this explains in so many ways their attitude, the adoption of a defeatist approach, which we could understand by looking into a book by the co-founder of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, that explains how we can be optimistic, Learned Optimism
  http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/07/l... but also what happens in the opposite situation – Martin Seligman had worked with dogs in special circumstances, where the animals were given a poor treatment, then allowed to escape the enclosure and it was discovered that those that had been exposed to shocks and had had no way to get out would show Learned Hopelessness to the degree that when they had the chance, they did not exit, because they had become hopeless, and on the contrary, the ones with a chance to get out when things were bad, had a different reaction.
  
  It seems that the Russians have been trapped for centuries and have Learned Hopelessness on a massive scale and we see that in To The Hermitage, wherein Denis Diderot travels to Sankt Petersburg, just like the story teller, and we experience with them the majesty of the city, we are awed by her Serene Imperial Majesty, who can be so progressive, but also cruel, when she orders the execution of so many that oppose her…the book is an ode, an homage to the great Philosopher, the one that gave some extraordinary insight into the art of acting, said that there is a ‘paradox that great actors display most passion when they invest the least, already he has invented Method acting’ – the way I remember it, from when I have read it some forty years ago is that Diderot gives the example of the amateur who tries to tell a crowd about something that has happened and though he is passionate, he does not find echo for his rendering, while somebody who is cerebral and detached would provoke much more emotion in the audience, so it is better not to use ‘the heart’, but the brain and it is wrong to say ‘oh, such good performance, he had his heart into it, he, she or they actually’
  Then we have some fabulous takes on life versus art and a one liner assessment of philosophy, in art versus literature, Malcolm Bradbury writes about how what happens in books is so much more exciting than life – in his jocular manner, he puts in two exceptions, Beckett and Kafka – and if we couple this analysis with the pronouncement of Umberto Eco – those who do not read have just one life, while readers have five thousand, this being immortality backwards – then we reach the conclusion that reading is the best possible choice, we reach not only immortality by reading – presumably the magnum opera, the crème de la crème, nec plus ultra Russians, Tolstoy, Gogol, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, but also Proust, Malamud, Kingsley Amis and so many more – but we are also in the Zone, we have reached Nirvana, Catharsis, Eudaimonia, Glasperlenspiel, Flow as described by the other co-author of positive psychology, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the zenith we reach when certain conditions are met, we are focused on the activity, we have clear goals, nothing else matters, time becomes fluid, we get constant feedback and we are in control and we have reached Maximum Joy in various forms - "The joy of the thinker- he has found the treasure of wisdom, he is enraptured"-
  http://realini.blogspot.com/2016/10/f...
  
  Denis Diderot has long sessions with the monarch in Sankt Petersburg, where the present despot had started, but one cannot help but wonder at the immense difference between Catherine the Great, so liberal and advanced almost two hundred and fifty years ago, especially when compared with the vicious murderer they now have in the Kremlin, for he has no tolerance for a different point of view, while the czarina could have a dialectical dialogue with the Great Philosopher, and accept when the latter expressed an opinion she disliked…it is true that the Age of Enlightment would end up in the bloody revolution of 1789, but so much of what Diderot, Voltaire and the other luminaries would represent a dramatic, fundamental change
  Some favorite quotes are here…
  Conceptual means we have not thought about it much, but we are cool, and something will happen to which we can add the name art. Postmodern means guess what, we managed to get a corporate sponsor to pay for it ...music aka silence in Sweden orchestra. Fiction is infinitely preferable to real life. As long as you avoid the books of Kafka or Beckett, the everlasting plot of fiction has fewer futile experiences than the careless plot of reality. Fiction's people are fuller, deeper, cleverer, more moving than those in real life…Its actions are more intricate, illuminating, noble, profound…There are many more dramas, climaxes, romantic fulfillment, twists, turns, gratified resolutions…Unlike reality, all of this you can experience without leaving the house or even getting out of bed…What's more, books are a form of intelligent human greatness, as stories are a higher order of sense…As random life is to destiny, so stories are to great authors, who provided us with some of the highest pleasures and the most wonderful mystifications we can find…Few stories are greater than Anna Karenina, that wise epic by an often foolish author…Kant shows we never know anything with pure objectivity, Schopenhauer proves it's not mind but will we think with, then comes Kierkegaard and the leap in the dark - no way of knowing being from nothingness…Followed by Nietzsche and the complete triumph of the irrational…Soon comes Heidegger and the collapse of all metaphysics…Then Wittgenstein and the whereof we cannot speak let us be silent…Michel Foucault and the total loss of the subject…Reason has gone the same way as religion....all we know is that cosmos is chaos, moving at fantastic speed toward an explosive and senseless destination no one can understand, it gets there and blows up or turns into anti matter…Diderot on Tristram Shandy, craziest, wisest and greatest of all books ' Sterne turned into Diderot, who turns into Mozart...he also turns into Proust and Joyce, Beckett and Nabokov
• 
  Dale

  I found this to be a curious book, and I mean "curious" in the pleasantly surprising way. It falls under the general heading (too wordy and not quite important enough to be a full-fledged GR bookshelf) of "books I found around the house, probably belonging to my wife, but possibly just picked up by either one of us, forgotten, and rediscovered". Those kind of books aren't necessarily arresting enough in concept or author's name and rep to get my attention in a bookstore while contemplating purchases, but as a free read because it's already in the house, I can give it a go.
  
  So, we have in To The Hermitage a fairly scholarly novel, but with its own very dry sense of humor, that splits itself between a kind of plotless examination of the nature of academics, true believers, and the modern state of the European Union, mostly focused on Sweden, as well as Russia, arguably Sweden's opposite, AND through a series of flashbacks a historical yet imaginary reconstruction of life in the court of Catherine the Great (and other of her head-of-state contemporaries) and rumination on the role of the philosopher as tutor and adviser to a king or queen.
  
  And all of the above is interesting and illuminating, but it kind of meanders around being interesting but not necessarily accumulating any decisive heft. If I hadn't been riding the bus and train for hours every day, I'm not sure I would have stuck with it and finished it. But I did, and I'm glad I did.
• 
  Barbara

  I loved this book.
  
  The chapters set in the present (well, c2000) recounting the author's (or "the author's"?)journey with the academic 'Diderot Project' from Sweden alternate with chapters set in the past, following the philosopher Diderot's journey to meet Catherine the Great in St Petersburgh
  
  The modern fellow-travellers are an interesting group, and that makes one well-told story, and Diderot's experiences and the complexities of European court politics he has to navigate another.
  
  I've ended up wanting to know more (there are lots of books acknowledged in the notes at the end, so no excuse not to research a bit for myself).
  
  I've just read this and it sounds really off-putting! Malcolm Bradbury has a lovely writing style and this book is very easy to read,even if (like me) you've never heard of Diderot.
  
  I read it as my bed-time read, which back-fired because I often found I was finally closing the book at around midnight (good thing I've retired!)
• 
  Robert Wechsler

  A delightful romp divided between Diderot’s visit to St. Petersburg in the 1770s and the narrator’s visit, with a so-called Diderot seminar, to St. Petersburg in the 1990s.
  
  It’s an intelligent entertainment, and it works. Bradbury’s Diderot is enjoyable, as are all his characters. The history is provided with humor, as is the satire of both today and back then. A great success.
  
• 
  Rena

  Είναι αριστούργημα. Κυρίως μου άρεσαν οι περιγραφές.
  Η περιγραφή των Στοκχόλμη και Ελσίνκι είναι καταπληκτική. Διάβαζα και ταυτόχρονα ξαναπερπατούσα στην πιο όμορφη πρωτεύουσα της Ευρώπης και στην όμορφη πόλη των δύο κόσμων (Δύσης και ΕΣΣΔ).
  
  Φαντάζομαι ότι το ίδιο καλά αποτυπώνει και την Πετρούπολη εποχής Γέλτσιν. Κρίμα που δεν έχω καταφέρει ακόμα να επισκεφτώ.
• 
  Ci

  500 pages of rambling -- some parts interesting, some parts puzzling. I did not really learn much about Diderot or Catherine the Great, but enjoyed its many wonderful turn of phrases
• 
  Marina

  
  
  Два параллельных сюжета:
  - Дидро приезжает в Россию к императрице Екатерине и пытается с помощью ее власти и своих идей изменить мир;
  - писателя приглашают участвовать в проекте "Дидро" (1993) и он, вместе другими разношерстными "жертвами" науки, приезжает в Россию и понимает, что мир стремительно меняется вокруг него, а для него остается одна лишь роль - роль наблюдателя.
  А мы? Где окажемся мы? По какую сторону баррикад поставит нас автор? Какую сторону примет сам автор? Кому он будет сочувствовать, а кого порицать? На первых страницах книги возникает много вопросов, но должна сказать, что Малькольм Брэбери оказался одним из тех крайне малочисленных авторов, которые крайне корректно ведут себя по отношению к читателю и его свободе. Тебя никто не тащит за ухо в одну сторону или в другую, ты волен сам бродить аллеями и переулками книги, рассматривать персонажей, ходить вокруг них кругами столько, сколько захочешь. Я считаю, что ощущение комфортности - это один из главных плюсов этого произведения.
  
  Еще порадовала "познавательность" этой книги. Взяла это слово в кавычки, ибо "В Эрмитаж!" ни в коем разе нельзя рассматривать как собрание достоверных энциклопедических фактов, хотя порой кажется, что ты теперь будешь уже все-все знать про Дидро или про Екатерину. Ну а как же не знать, если ты был с ними в Петербурге, ты присутствовал на этих встречах, где два блистательнейших ума своей эпохи обсуждали, как развиваться миру и России в частности, как они спорили и шутили, смеялись и грустили. Книга толкает на кропотливое изучение реальных событий и биографий. Закрываешь книгу и бегом штудировать википедию, а потом уже и более серьезные источники. Потому что тянет. Потому что хочется. Для меня это очень важно. Книги, которые есть не просто художественным деликатесом, а еще и расширяют твои горизонты познания мира - воистину сокровище.
  
  Рекомендовала бы книгу в первую очередь трем категориям читателей (другим тоже, но в нижеперечисленных случаях должно быть почти наверняка 100%-ное попадание):
  - любителям английской прозы;
  - интересующимся эпохой Екатерины II;
  - научным сотрудникам и работникам высшей школы, которые знают истинный смысл слов "проект" и "симпозиум".
  
  9 / 10
  
• 
  Martha

  I am traveling and, so, am reading a few specific books. I read the thick bio of Catherine the Great a few years ago. Am listening to it in my car now. I read Zaretsky’s Catherine and Diderot because it was skinny and fell in like with Diderot. I do not remember how I learned about Bradbury’s book, but I love it. I highly recommend - thus the 💫 but think, if you are like me, you’ll need a brief intro such as the Zaretsky. Diderot’s relationship with Catherine and his trip to Russia are fascinating.
  
• 
  Sarah Maguire

  It took quite a while to get into this novel, and I'm glad I made the effort. It traces (or purports to trace) Denis Diderot's sojourn at the court of Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century, and the subsequent 1990s journey to St Petersburg of an ill-assorted group which may, or may not, be a pilgrimage attempting to follow his footsteps. Wry, wide ranging, and endlessly questioning, it will suit those who like a book for the journey rather than the end result.
• 
  ErnstG

  Two story lines:
  
  Diderot goes to Moscow to meet Catherine the Great, at a time when there is a revolt in Moscow. The interaction with Franklin and Jefferson is a bit silly for my taste but it is incidental.
  
  An English literary academic participates in a conference named for Diderot in Russia, at the time when Yeltsin fights for power in Moscow (and wins).
  
  Bron Waugh is right -- it is a lot of fun. But the author surely also wanted to tell us things about books and reality
• 
  Chris P

  An interesting book, but I have to warn you its a bit of a hard slog to read. Divided into two distinct time periods in alternating chapters it follows both the story of Diderot's time at the Hermitage with Catherine the Great of Russia and a modern (1990's) junket undertaken by a group of academics researching their own "Diderot Project" with little purpose other than accessing some government grant money. Surprisingly I found myself much more enthralled in the "Now" sections and by 300 pages in I was just pushing myself to skim through the more contrived "Then" parts.
  On the cover of my edition is a pull quote by Auberon Waugh lauds this novel as "the funniest book ever written" and while it is full of wit and satire its not exactly a lol kind of light read. Having said, that the depiction of our "Now" narrator's struggle with Swedish bureaucracy in the very first chapter is one of the funniest parts of the book and is perhaps a good indicator of whether you will appreciate the style or not.
• 
  Lucy Hutchinson

  This was just wonderful. I have read it again recently and noticed a lot more detail.
  The book is split between two time periods, and does it flawlessly. I have seen other books struggle to do this (Labyrinth by Kate Mosse as an example).
  I don't want to give any spoilers but it revolves around Diderot visiting the court of Catherine the great, and an academic in our time visiting Sweden to work on the Diderot project.
  It is a sizeable tome and took me a while to get through but it was a pleasure to read.
  Each character sang out, especially Catherine, and was full of historical fact too.
  Beautifully written and wonderfully told.
• 
  Geoff

  Three quarters of the way through. I've been struggling to finish this for several years. It's in the pile on my bedside table but rarely gets selected. My completion nerosis demands that I must eventually finish it.
• 
  Rachel

  I tried for more than 200 pages on this book but I could not get into it. I'm even obsessed with Russia and visiting this May but my interest was not held. The writing was well-done but I didn't care what happened to anyone...too many books on my TBR pile to stick with one that bores me.
• 
  Magpie

  Kylie 2016