I have to declare an interest here. During the 1980s, I worked for some years as an editor at the Times Literary Supplement, once the leading book-review publication in the English-speaking world. The TLS used to have an enormous reputation, and even in my day people were duly impressed whenever I told them who my employer was. I wouldn't say that the TLS was a great newspaper during my years there. Like most publications, it ran some pretty decent stuff, but it also ran a lot of pretentious claptrap.

By and large though, its strength was its literary pedigree. If Oxford University Press was bringing out an anthology of 18th century English poetry, the TLS would be the place to go to find out how good it was. If Cambridge University Press was bringing out a new history of the French Revolution, the TLS would be the place to go to find out whether the book was worth investing your hard-earned income.

As I learned while working at the TLS, book reviews are not as easy to write as many people think it is. I was in awe of some of the TLS writers--often academic historians--who could turn out model 800-word essays about complicated subjects while also providing fair descriptions of the books they had been assigned to review. That was the good side of the TLS: competent and good writers turning out copy on time. Their work comprised about 50 percent of the paper.

The remaining 50 percent was pretty worthless: tedious reviews of the latest works of fiction, reviews of West End plays that had already been reviewed or would be likely to be reviewed in dozens of other publications, academically pretentious claptrap, and above all self-regarding political musings from self-regarding "thinkers"--men and women without any knowledge of anything but full of grand notions about the supposed world-historical importance of their moral posturing. I don't remember too many of those essays now, but their authors were deemed weighty thinkers back in the 1980s, though--or perhaps because--they never departed from what was conventional wisdom back then. These thinkers are largely and deservedly forgotten today, though in the strangely parochial literary-intellectual world of London, they doubtless still churn out the odd philippic and, in their dotage, enjoy the adulation of young journalists hoping to advance their careers by writing obsequious profiles of the great and the good. Can I please have a contract to write a book about the correspondence between Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis?

All of this is by way of introducing a horrific essay that has just appeared in the TLS. The author is a Ukrainian, Oksana Zabushko. I can't summarize the essay, because it's hard to identify a logical thread of thought in her hate-filled screed. The thrust of her essay isn't that Putin is evil, that the KGB was evil, that Russians are evil, that Stalin was evil, that Communists are evil--no, what she argues is that Russian culture is evil, that Russian Literature is evil. More evil than that are the Westerners who have elevated Russian Literature into the pantheon of Western Civilization. Not only are Russians barbarians, but Russian Literature is barbaric, and should have no place as a field of literary study. The killers of Bucha (the word Bucha is repeated ad nauseam in this essay) were not ordinary Russians, but Russian writers--above all of course Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

That a newspaper that was once the leading literary newspaper in the English-speaking world should publish such an intellectually-worthless screed is bad enough. What's truly frightening is that it is now deemed acceptable to tear down one of the great achievements of Western civilization--Russian culture--just in order to suck up to the powers that be. No one had dared to do this during the Cold War. Since then the dams have broken. I guess in a world in which Shakespeare can be dismissed as a nothing more than yet another dead white male, nothing should be surprising.

http://tls.newspaperdirect.com/epaper/iphone/homepage.aspx#_article220cfb11-7c31-4f66-93cc-6562c2545892