Man out of Time | Los Angeles Review of Books

The travels and ecstasies of a Russian aesthete.Evocations of Italy by Pavel Pavlovich Muratov. Translated by Lena M. Lenček. Northwestern University Press, 2026. 912 pages.Did you know LARB is a reader-supported nonprofit?LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts freely accessible to the public. Help us continue this work with your tax-deductible donation today!FOR SOMEONE LOOKING to escape history, Italy has always been a destination. Mostly this is because of the pictures. Great culture has been produced in a lot of places and times, of course, but there is something about the civilizations of the Apennine Peninsula—and particularly the visual art produced at their high points—that has provoked even the most levelheaded observers into feeling that, like a passenger exiting a train, time is something they can get off at their convenience. Sometimes this freedom causes a kind of vertigo—a pupil-dilating hurtle, like a stereograph’s leap into the third dimension. Here, for example, is William Butler Yeats squinting at a postcard on the wall of his friend Ezra Pound’s apartment in Rapallo in 1929:He has shown me upon the wall a photograph of a Cosimo Tura decoration in three compartments, in the upper the Triumph of Love and the Triumph of Chastity, in the middle Zodiacal signs, and in the lower certain events in Cosimo Tura’s day. […] I may, now that I have recovered leisure, find that the mathematical structure, when taken up into imagination, is more than mathematical, that seemingly irrelevant details fit together into a single theme, that here is no botch of tone and colour, all Hodos Chameliontos, except for some odd corner where one discovers beautiful detail like that finely modelled foot in Porteous’ disastrous picture.“More than mathematical” may feel like a lot to see in a 450-year-old painting, but to Yeats and Pound—two self-exiles trying to hoist themselves out of what they perceived to be, respectively, the backwaters of the Irish and American 19th centuries—the d’Este frescoes were not just decorations: they were proofs.

They demonstrated that art could be constructed by combining daily life and myth into super-works that trusted their audience to make connections between things that, at first glance, did not seem to be connected. Even more importantly, they implied, like so many masterpieces of Italian art, that there was a vantage point the artist’s mind could reach, a summit from which overwhelming and seemingly conflicting details made sense, fitting together into a single, coherent image.Cut back to Italy (naturally), 1910, where another brilliant combiner is examining the d’Este frescoes, this time in person. His name is Pavel Muratov, and he is Russian. For several years, he has devoted himself to the study of Italian culture and art through a combination of grand tours and sporadic expatriations. His companions have included (or will include) everyone from the poet Vladislav Khodasevich to socialist writer Maxim Gorky to the literary phenom Nina Berberova, whose memoirs contain what remains the single best description of Muratov ever written: he was “a man of quiet, who understood storms, and a man of inner order, who understood the inner disorder of others.” Now, faced with the frescoes, that ordered man writes:The frescoes of the Ferrara cycle all radiate the joy of a simple, decorous way of life, and a faith in the irrefutable happiness of existence. Borso is always benevolent and generous, and his lips are always set in a proud smile. His hunting expeditions are always successful; his justice is always fair […] Everything Cossa [the presumed author of the frescoes] saw had an effect as intoxicating as the crystalline air of the divine outdoors. He even saw constellations dispensing their blessings and was endlessly enthralled by the ethereal outlines of their mysterious signs. Ferrara could contemplate the headlong rush of the zodiac without fear.Differences in style aside, what interests Muratov in the d’Este panels is essentially the same thing that interests Yeats: that is, their capacity for fitting the universe together. Yet there’s an echo of irony in the Russian’s paraphrase that makes his admiration feel qualified and even a little wistful, at least compared to the prophetic enthusiasm of his Irish contemporary.

It’s as if the two writers were thinking toward their shared subject not just through different national traditions or genres but also from different points in time, maybe even different relationships to history. Yeats (the perpetual John the Baptist of Anglophone modernism) is writing from inside his present moment, as if his words could burn through the chaos of his time and into some structure hidden underneath it. Muratov, on the other hand, seems to be regarding the frescoes from a slight remove, like a Sibyl who knows beforehand that her prophecy will be misunderstood.It’s not hard to imagine where this outsider perspective might have come from. By 1908, the year that he began the decade of travel and writing that would culminate in his masterpiece, Evocations of Italy (published in Russian between 1911 and 1924, now translated into English for the first time by Lena M. Lenček), the country Muratov had been born into had already started to unravel. The Russo-Japanese War had ended in Russia’s defeat. Meanwhile, the unrest that would lead to the October Revolution could already be felt boiling in everything from politics to the literary symbolism practiced by writers like Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely—writers whose influence was by that point past its prime, even though the pleiad of silver age writers had not yet reached their full cultural relevance. Against the background of these changes, Muratov appeared as an appropriately miscellaneous talent: the kind of belletristic jack-of-all-trades whose facility and breadth of knowledge made his friends wonder if there was anything he couldn’t write about. But it wasn’t until his first grand tour that he discovered a subject that answered his energies. Here he is recreating that discovery in Evocations’ first chapter, on Venice:Only in the first few days is it difficult to find your way in the maze of Venetian streets and narrow canals, but then you become used to it and even begin to love its unexpected logic. And so, proceeding like the knight in a game of chess, you chart a course of right angles and advance into the remote quarter of the Madonna dell’Orto, where there is an astonishing spot: an open-air pool, without a living soul, next to the former Abbazia della Misericordia.

The stillness of these shallow waters, the solitude, the enormous, abandoned buildings on the embankment—everything here inspires a sense of an otherworldly peace. Everything is like some ancient, forgotten dream.With its coiling, Pre-Raphaelite mistiness, this passage perfectly relays the attraction that we can imagine Venice exerting on someone seeing it for the first time—and not just the first time, either. This stylization is one of the tricks of Evocations, which in Russia has reached the kind of classic status that even the most beloved books on travel, or art, rarely achieve. Here and elsewhere in the volumes, Muratov stays pointillistically specific while still providing a sense of abstraction, as if describing something that happened not merely once but over and over again, that was, somehow, perpetually happening. Muratov uses the simple present tense (“uncompleted present” in Russian) to transform his paragraphs into palimpsests, an overlay that is no less vivid for being repeated. Similarly, he expands the “I” that must have initially received this impression into a series of “ones” and “yous,” allowing us to imagine ourselves seeing these things. The total effect is to create a braided induction into the “unexpected logic” of Venice, and by extension Italy itself, the “knight’s move” of thinking and feeling that Evocations of Italy will attempt to transmit over its succeeding 900 pages.It’s an ambition that Muratov’s fellow modernists would have recognized, especially Pound, whose long poem The Cantos is, after all, nothing less than an insane textbook and Baedeker guide to the history of Western civilization. But whereas Pound aimed his pedagogy using the accusatory thou shalt (or, more often, shalt not) of Old Testament prophecy, Muratov uses the more inviting tactics that one might expect from an actual guide. He beckons us forward, pointing out a painting or crumbling ruin, zooming in on a subject—the life of the libertine Casanova, for example, or the birth of the Italian commedia dell’arte.

But even in these more focused chapters, what makes the experience of reading Evocations of Italy so dazzling is the effortlessness with which Muratov navigates these historical strata, moving from one high point to the next with a touch so light and sure that it makes even his most offhanded comparisons feel inevitable.This is not to say that every stop on Muratov’s tour is lighthearted. On the contrary, one of the most remarkable aspects of his attention is the way that it earns its “privileged moments” (as Muratov’s hero Walter Pater put it) via patient explanation of their context. A few pages after introducing us to the Venice of Madonnas and glimmering pools, Muratov directs our attention, gently but firmly, toward the surveillance state that ruled the city in the 16th century:The state watched over everything: it would not be an exaggeration to say that it kept track of every step every citizen took. It kept an eye on clothing, family affairs, wine imports, church attendance, secret sins, new fashions, traditional customs, matrimonies, funerals, balls, and banquets. It permitted only what was necessary in its eyes, and in determining what could and could not be done, it showed remarkable wisdom. Like it or not, every citizen was at the service of the ‘most serene’ republic and was obligated to contribute in his or her own way. Everything that today, in the paintings, looks like nothing more than a felicitous or casual juxtaposition of figures in sumptuous clothing, exotic servants, and precious fabrics, concealed a political meaning; the “good of the state” covertly informed every undertaking.Reading passages like this, it’s hard not to think of the Voronezh-born intellectual’s own experience with “most serene republics,” whether the autocracy of his early youth or the communist dictatorship that succeeded it. The years Muratov was working on Evocations coincided with the Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian Civil War, and though, of course, he could not foresee the ramifications of these events, the sheer acuity of his mind and his honesty as a historian sensitized him to the tensions binding “artist” and “society” together in sometimes paradoxical ways. Venice is a dream; Venice is a prison: an inescapable nightmare and a dream so good its prisoners never want to leave.