Лучшие книги Джорджа Стайнера

Толстой и Достоевский — это поистине визитная карточка русской литературы для иностранного читателя. Этими двумя творцами издавна восхищаются за рубежом, их произведения находят всё новые интерпретации, а их мастерством вдохновляются иностранные писатели. ""Ни один английский романист по величию не сравнится с Толстым, столь полно изобразившим жизнь человека как с частной, так и с героической стороны. Ни один английский романист не исследовал душу человека так глубоко, как Достоевский"", — говорил знаменитый писатель Э.М. Форстер. Американский литературный критик, профессор Джордж Стайнер посвятил Толстому и Достоевскому свой знаменитый труд, исследуя глубины сходства двух гениев и пропасти их различия.

Книга выдающегося литературного критика, писателя и филолога посвящена наиболее фундаментальным вопросам философии языка. При этом многие из них анализируются сквозь призму понятия перевода, трактуемого автором неожиданно широко. Пытаясь осмыслить основополагающий для нашей цивилизации миф о вавилонском смешении, автор приходит к выводу о том, что парадоксальное многообразие человеческих языков – результат нашей тяги к охранению тайны личного пространства, а также нежелания принимать действительность такой, какая она есть.
Читателя привлекут беспримерная эрудиция автора и особый стиль повествования.
Книгу найдут важной для прочтения литературоведы, филологи, лингвисты, философы, переводчики, культурологи, но также и все, кто интересуется вопросами философии языка и истории литературы.

“Four impressive lectures about the culture of recent times (from the French Revolution) and the conceivable culture of times to come. Mr. Steiner’s discussion of the break with the traditional literary past (Jewish, Christian, Greek, and Latin) is illuminating and attractively undogmatic. He writes as a man sharing ideas, and his original notions, though scarcely cheerful, have the bracing effect that first-rate thinking always has.” –New Yorker
“In Bluebeard’s Castle is a brief and brilliant book. An intellectual tour de force, it is also a book that should generate a profound excitement and promote a profound unease…like the great culturalists of the past. Steiner uses a dense and plural learning to assess his topic: his book has the outstanding quality of being not simply a reflection on culture, but an embodiment of certain contemporary resources within it. The result is one of the most important books I have read for a very long time.”—New Society

Between 1967 and 1997, George Steiner wrote more than 130 pieces on a great range of topics for The New Yorker, making new books, difficult ideas, and unfamiliar subjects seem compelling not only to intellectuals but to “the common reader.” He possesses a famously dazzling mind: paganism, the Dutch Renaissance, children’s games, war-time Britain, Hitler’s bunker, and chivalry attract his interest as much as Levi-Strauss, Cellini, Bernhard, Chardin, Mandelstam, Kafka, Cardinal Newman, Verdi, Gogol, Borges, Brecht, Wittgenstein, Chomsky, and art historian/spy Anthony Blunt. Steiner makes an ideal guide from the Risorgimento in Italy to the literature of the Gulag, from the history of chess to the enduring importance of George Orwell. Again and again everything Steiner looks at in his New Yorker essays is made to bristle with some genuine prospect of turning out to be freshly thrilling or surprising.

Imagine, thirty years after the end of World War II, Israeli Nazi-hunters, some of whom lost relatives in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany, find a silent old man deep in the Amazon jungle. He is Adolph Hitler. The narrative that follows is a profound and disturbing exploration of the nature of guilt, vengeance, language, and the power of evil—each undiminished over time. George Steiner's stunning novel, now with a new afterword, will continue to provoke our thinking about Nazi Germany's unforgettable past.

"Two readings have convinced me that this is a fiction of extraordinary power and thoughtfulness. . . . [A] remarkable novel."—Bernard Bergonzi, Times Literary Supplement

"In this tour de force Mr. Steiner makes his reader re-examine, to whatever conclusions each may choose, a history from which we would prefer to avert our eyes."—Edmund Fuller, Wall Street Journal

"Portage largely avoids both the satisfactions of the traditional novel and the horrifying details of Holocaust literature. Instead, Steiner has taken as his model the political imaginings of an Orwell or Koestler. . . . He has produced a philosophic fantasy of remarkable intensity."—Otto Friedrich, Time

George Steiner is one of the preeminent essayists and literary thinkers of our era. In this remarkable book he concerns himself with language and the relation of language to literature and to religion. Written during a period when the art of reading and the status of a text have been threatened by literary movements that question their validity and by computer technology, Steiner's essays affirm the primacy of reading in the classical sense.

Steiner covers a wide range of subjects, from the Hebrew Bible, Homer, and Shakespeare to Kafka, Kierkegaard, Simone Weil, Husserl, and Freud. The theme of Judaism's tragic destiny winds through his thinking, in particular as he muses about whether Jewish scripture and the Talmud are the Jew's true homeland, the parallels between the "last supper" of Socrates and the Last Supper of Jesus, and the necessity for Christians to hold themselves accountable for their invective and impotence during the Holocaust.

As an incisive and provocative critic of literature, language, and culture, George Steiner has acquired an international reputation and a devoted following. "He scatters bright ideas everywhere," writes The New York Times Book Review, "and they are sure to be picked up." This volume presents a rich sampling of Steiner's ideas, including selections from his seminal books The Death of Tragedy, After Babel, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, and Language and Science. Aside from pointing to work that lies ahead, this anthology offers a rich retrospective of the intellectual ground Steiner has already covered. Whether discussing Marxist literary theory, the significance of Tolstoy, or the problems of treating sexual material in literature, Steiner's writings give us the pleasure of watching an astute and nimble mind constantly at work.

Brillante conversador, adem?s de erudito, George Steiner (en contraposici?n dial?ctica con su interlocutor, Antoine Spire) se abre a un relato vivo, apasionado, que nos lleva al l?mite de la paradoja y la provocaci?n. Desde aspectos de su propia biograf?a a los asuntos m?s espinosos abordados en la obra de este gigante de la cultura europea, sus pensamientos tocan la m?sica, la filosof?a, la poes?a y la literatura, el lugar que corresponde a un hombre culto enfrentado a la barbarie, as? como la relaci?n a menudo tr?gica y ambigua entre la filosof?a y el despotismo, entre el juda?smo y Auschwitz como s?mbolo del mal absoluto. Y todo ello sin perder de vista la cr?tica l?cida de otros fil?sofos contempor?neos, como Sartre y Derrida, una cr?tica en que el punto de vista de Steiner se hace m?s n?tido y afilado. &t;br/&t; La barbarie de la ignorancia —que publicamos ahora con una nueva traducci?n, un apartado final, «Stacca to», no recogido en la edici?n castellana anterior, y un ep?logo en el que Antoine Spire rememora un encuentro no del todo f?cil con el fil?sofo— seguir? sorprendiendo al lector por la lucidez y la combatividad de un autor cuya libertad de pensamiento y exigencia intelectual y moral constituyen hoy como ayer un aldabonazo para nuestras conciencias.