Man out of Time | Los Angeles Review of Books

Evocations of Italy by Pavel Pavlovich Muratov. Translated by Lena M. Lenček. Northwestern University Press, 2026. 912 pages.

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. While prostitutes and police haunted the streets outside his house, Tintoretto (whom Muratov calls “the last great artist of the Italian Renaissance”) painted portraits whose “spirituality” derives not from the transcendent isolation of their subjects but from the painter’s capacity to open those subjects up to the larger currents swirling around them:

Tintoretto is not a psychologist; character interests him little because character is only a momentary and accidental aspect of a unitary human spirit. Some of these patricians were good, others were bad, some were perfidious, others magnanimous. But what does this matter? Is it not, perhaps, more important how much of the human, the eternal, and the universal they had in themselves? How much vital energy moved their heavy bodies, draped in voluminous red cloaks, gave their gaze that penetrating radiance, and produced the swarm of thoughts within their fevered skulls?

What does this matter? Muratov’s question is not just rhetorical; it’s personal. It’s the question of a man who, even as he lived through one of the most tumultuous periods in Russian history (the first volume of Evocations of Italy, in which the chapter on Tintoretto appears, was published in 1911, the full three-volume edition of Evocations in 1924), was still trying to balance the particular and the general. Muratov’s method for doing this, here and throughout the book, is a lot like the one he describes in Tintoretto’s painting, in which the “heavy bodies” and “voluminous red cloaks” of his subjects exist not simply because they are beautiful but in order to call a kind of presence into the painting (the term comes from John Berger, a critic Muratov surely would have loved if he had lived long enough to read him). Similarly, for Muratov, the task of the critic, rather than just to list off details, is to use those details to evoke something that is essentially beyond them: the timelessness and transcendence that we experience in great art, which is why it continues to matter to us.

Putting an exact name on the presence at the center of great art (“the eternal”? “a unitary human spirit”?) is perhaps less important than being able to see it, and to put us in a position to see it. Even at its vaguest, the abstraction of Muratov’s prose feels less evasive than generous, as if he were trying to give us space to appreciate for ourselves the works he’s discussing. The more we acclimate to the rhythms of his descriptions, the more we come to anticipate that even the rhapsodies will be followed by contextual storytelling that makes the former feel less like escapism than a distillation of general forces. In his ability to show us both sides of a story (the rapturous singularity of a masterpiece, say, as well as its network of influences), Muratov is himself both a man of his time and a distinctive art critic. He translated Walter Pater and Vernon Lee, but he also read Mikhail Bakunin and Karl Marx. This combination of aestheticism and materialism might sound like an awkward fit, but in Evocations’ best chapters, they work together perfectly, enriching each other in ways that can feel thrillingly counterintuitive, as, for example, in his discussion of The Last Supper:

For the artists of the time, The Last Supper was a disaster. […]

In Leonardo’s work, everything that had made up the exquisite charm of the Quattrocento was eliminated: the grace of its imperfections, the romance of its stumbling thought, the mystery of its hesitant consciousness, and the sweetness of its awkward speech. On the wall of the Cenacolo, as the result of many years of exertion by a great mind, everything had been understood, worked out, articulated. […]

Only Venice was spared by some miracle. Everywhere else, the “joyful craft” of the painter was sacrificed to genius.

Heresy! But even as we gasp, we are inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to a writer with Muratov’s titanic grasp of art history. His discussion of The Last Supper highlights an interesting limitation of his criticism, which, despite its brilliance, can feel at times unduly inclined toward an esotericism, a snobbish preference for the lesser known and the obscure. It is a preference that, perhaps, owes something to the venerable Russian predilection for talking around the truth rather than directly at it. This is the tradition that contemporary Russian poetics has called “apophatic” (from the Greek phanai, to say, and apo-, away); as the poet Reginald Gibbons puts it, “what is present is an absence, like meaningful negative space in a sculpture.” Though hardly a self-consciously apophatic book, Evocations of Italy tends to avoid the more obvious tourist traps, preferring back roads and side alleys that take longer but provide a richer trek. The peripatesis accumulates a kind of nervous suggestiveness the further we progress: Where exactly is this tour going? And where is the high point we were promised, that devastating view our tour guide has been saving?

This kind of impatience grows as Muratov’s journey (technically a collage of journeys) winds toward its formal end in Evocations’ third volume. The final volume represents the back half of cramps and frequent snack breaks, but it’s also the less pressurized stretch where Muratov’s love of slowness and unexpected connections really gets to shine. We encounter discourses on Muratov’s beloved Piero della Francesca (“His piety, profound and ancient, carries more wisdom, meaning, and universality than the ecclesiastical piety of, say, a Fra Angelico”) and the similarities between Saint Francis and the Russian yurodivy (holy fool). Still, despite the clear relish of these and other digressions, a certain heaviness seeps into the tone of the writing, a drag that can feel almost physical, as if the indefatigable strider of the first two volumes were trying to remember which of these groves will provide the best opportunity for a nap. At times, the fatigue can erupt into exaggeration, or at least an end-of-summer jitteriness that feels almost desperate:

So long as white oxen drink from the Springs of Clitunno as they did in Virgil’s time, and so long as larks circle in the warm currents above the fields of Bevagna as they did in the days of Francis of Assisi, so long will the world seek here the treasure of innocence and joy with which to redeem its many sorrows and moral failures.

This is Italy the haven, Italy the single still point in a tumbling world. It’s the kind of refuge that tourists of every age dream of finding. But to the reader in the 21st century, when the larks have been scattered by light pollution and the springs filled with pesticide, Muratov’s devotion to the high ground of Italy can feel less like a retreat than a strategic maneuver. Beauty, nobility, spirit: These are, after all, lights by which to judge the failures of our era. In a similar way, during his own visionary travel journal, Journey to Armenia (1933), the poet Osip Mandelstam (whom Muratov would die without ever having met) asked “Which tense do you want to live in?” before going on to answer his question:

I want to live in the imperative of the future passive participle, in the “what ought to be.” […]

Yes, the Latin genius, when it was young and greedy, created that form of imperative verbal traction as the prototype of our whole culture, and it was not the only thing that “ought to be” but the thing that “ought to be praised”—laudatura est—[that which pleases].

For all its insight, Muratov’s book lacks the poetic audacity to state the case this directly (Mandelstam: “Poetry is the certainty of being right”). But its yearning clearly stems from the same unshakable, homing-pigeon “imperative” for the example of Italy (Mandelstam again: “There is no syntax: there is a magnetized impulse, a longing for the stern of a ship, a longing for a forage of worms, a longing for an unpromulgated law, a longing for Florence”). As Muratov himself acknowledges, the example of Italy is hardly straightforward; on the contrary, it’s tortured in a way that can feel pedagogically problematic but is just a deeper part of the lesson. At the end of the day, skipping the messiness of the world to get to its masterpieces misses what may be the grand tour’s most enduring truth—namely, that even the most miraculous work of art is born, not just into history, but also out of it. This doesn’t make it any less miraculous, but it does make it more human and approachable, at least to those of us willing to abandon our worship and embrace a way of thinking about the cultures of the past that is intimate and probably uncomfortable.

It might be disappointing too, but as any good traveler knows, a journey that doesn’t risk disappointment isn’t a journey: it’s a trip, a leisure cruise that glides along without ever giving its passengers a chance to discover that the thing they take away is the same thing they brought. Because fields flood, and the masterpieces of one generation become the minor works of the next. But longing remains. This is the tragedy of history, which no one escapes; it’s also history’s hope, or at least the beginning of it. In many ways, it’s the only “eternal” truth that Italy discloses, as Muratov acknowledges in his epilogue, writing in the simple past tense as he watches a steamship passing the same Venice where he began his journey:

The Torino left at night, and in the morning, I spent a long time looking at the spot on the water’s surface where it had sat the day before, glowing enticingly with its white electric lights, making no unseemly noise in the Venetian silence. Was that a sign that I was not destined to see new countries, legendary and extraordinary? So be it. But may the vow I took that moment be fulfilled one day: to return to Italy, even more faithful to it and more liberated by it, and see again the quiet splendor of the Venetian lagoon and in the circle of its horizon here end my days.

He didn’t end up doing this, unfortunately, although here again we could remind ourselves that some of the best prophecies are the ones that stay unfulfilled. Muratov died, after a life spent in exile in Berlin, Rome, Paris, and London, on October 5, 1950, in a small village in Ireland. His grave—a slab of weather-beaten granite—gives us the details in the form of dates and the name (or at least the anglicized version): “Paul Muratoff, 1881–1950.”