Icons and Cockroaches

For the first time in quite a few years I'm impatiently waiting for a book release. It's a rare event for a number of reasons, the primary ones being that most of my reading consists of 1 - biographies and novels that I've read a dozen times before and 2- as many already published books I can find on whatever topic I happen to be obsessed with at the moment (more on that in the future). Well the stars have aligned and a new release is overlapping with a topic that fit into that second category: Russian writer  and the subject of Cornell Press's Disenchanted Wanderer: The Apocalyptic Vision of Konstantin Leontiev . For anyone interested in the history of Russian conservatism or just Russian culture in general, Leontiev is a refreshing and interesting figure because of his biography and the impossibility of categorizing him according to modern standards. A minor noble born in 1861, he developed an aesthetic approach to life and morality, prioritizing the picturesque over

 I've had this thing for years and haven't done anything with it. I was reminded of it a few weeks ago when my cat meowed at me until I followed him into the kitchen early one morning. There on its back in the middle of the room was a dying cockroach, probably the victim of the misdirected hunting instincts of our feline: he has no rodents to chase and he is above killing mere insects, usually only injuring them before meowing until someone comes to finish the creature off. After I was spraying some anti-roach spray in the basement another dead one turned up. While sitting in my home office afterwards I saw my icon of St John of Kronstadt and incredulously thought  of the phrase "icons and cockroaches" and how it should be an attractive metaphor for Russian history of even life in general and not just  a  description of things  that happen to be in my home at any given time. That led to "Hey, didn't I start a blog a while back named something like that".