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    To the Hermitage: A Novel
    Unavailable
    To the Hermitage: A Novel
    Unavailable
    To the Hermitage: A Novel
    Ebook659 pages9 hours

    To the Hermitage: A Novel

    By Malcolm Bradbury

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    From a Booker Prize finalist, a novel that offers “a striking and effective blend of past and present, literary sleuthing and travelogue” (Publishers Weekly).
     
    This unique, sprawling tale intertwines two stories: a modern-day one in which an English professor journeys to Stockholm, and then St. Petersburg, for an academic conference on the French philosopher Diderot amid the tumult of early post-Soviet Russia; and another in which Diderot himself visits the palace of Catherine the Great in the late eighteenth century.
     
    What follows is a “genuinely funny” intellectual adventure that takes us from coup to countercoup, from bickering academics to elderly librarians—and into the enigmatic secrets of the Diderot Project (Library Journal).
     
    “At once a joyous romp through the groves of academe and a rousing paean to the life of the mind.” —Booklist
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateApr 1, 2002
    ISBN9781468302202
    Unavailable
    To the Hermitage: A Novel
    Author

    Malcolm Bradbury

    Malcolm Bradbury was a well-known novelist, critic and academic. He co-founded the famous creative writing department at the University of East Anglia, whose students have included Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro. His novels are Eating People is Wrong (1959); Stepping Westward (1965); The History Man (1975), which won the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize; Rates of Exchange (1983), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Cuts (1987); Doctor Criminale (1992); and To the Hermitage (2000). He wrote several works of non-fiction, humour and satire, including Who Do You Think You Are? (1976), All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go (1982) and Why Come to Slaka? (1991). He was an active journalist and a leading television writer, responsible for the adaptations of Porterhouse Blue, Cold Comfort Farm and many TV plays and episodes of Inspector Morse, A Touch of Frost, Kavanagh QC and Dalziel and Pascoe. He was awarded a knighthood in 2000 for services to literature and died later the same year.

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    Reviews for To the Hermitage

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    • 4/5
      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.