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This is the official home page of Lesley Chamberlain, writer, critic and journalist.
Lesley Chamberlain was born in Rochford, England in 1951. Educated at the universities of Exeter and Oxford, she went to Soviet Russia as a Reuter correspondent in 1978 before leaving full-time employment to pursue her real interests.
Her book Nietzsche in Turin, published in 1996, set a new standard of empathy in writing about a difficult and controversial philosopher and was widely acclaimed. One critic said: ‘This is simply the best book I have read in a very long time on the greatest philosopher of the modern age.’
Since her first book in 1982, The Food and Cooking of Russia, she has published nine works of non-fiction, a novel and a book of short stories. Titles include In The Communist Mirror, Volga Volga A Journey Down the Great River and Girl in a Garden.
Her interest in the history of ideas is reflected in a study of Freud and a book-length essay on Russian philosophy. Her latest work The Philosophy Steamer Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligentsia combines a novelist’s empathetic presentation of individual lives with a unique account of the historic moment when Russia expelled ‘the great and the good’.
She currently reviews for the Times Literary Supplement and the Independent. Her journalism has appeared in a wide range of newspapers and magazines and she regularly contributes to the ‘Twenty Minutes’ talks slot on BBC Radio 3.
Like most writers some of my work is autobiographical. But the overwhelming influences on all my work, including fiction, have come from Russian and German literature, from modern European history and from the history of ideas. The point where the personal and the historical meet is what I want to capture.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Philosophy Steamer Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligentsia (Atlantic Books 2006)
Motherland A Philosophical History of Russia (Atlantic Books 2004)
Girl in a Garden A Novel (Atlantic Books 2003)
The Secret Artist A Close Reading of Sigmund Freud (Quartet 2000, Seven Stories [US] (2003)
In a Place Like That (Quartet 1998)
Nietzsche in Turin (Quartet 1996, Picador US 1997)
Volga Volga A Journey Down the Great River (Picador 1995)
In the Communist Mirror (Faber 1990)
The Food and Cooking of Eastern Europe (Penguin 1989, reprinted with a new introduction by the author, University of Nebraska Press 2006)
The Food and Cooking of Russia (Penguin/Allen Lane 1982, reprinted with a new introduction by the author, University of Nebraska Press 2006)
Editions
F.P. Marinetti The Futurist Cookbook , translated by Suzanne Brill, edited and with an introduction by Lesley Chamberlain Trefoil London 1989
TRANSLATED EDITIONS
Nietzsche en Turin (Gedisa, Barcelona 1998)
Nietzsche in Turin (Atlas, Amsterdam 2000)
Nietzsche in Torino (Editura Vivaldi Bucuresti 1999)
Nietzsche em Turim (BCD Uniao de Editoras S.A. Rio de Janeiro (2000)
Gli ultimi anni du un filosofo (Editori Riuniti Rome 1999) SINCE THIS LICENCE HAS NEVER BEEN PAID FOR, THIS EDITION REPRESENTS A PIRATE EDITION IN THE AUTHOR’S VIEW.
Nietzsche in Turin (Chinese edition, Taiwan, Athena Press 2000)
WORK IN PROGRESS
Two works of fiction, still under wraps, and a journey in the history of ideas, A Shoe Story, for which see the Noticeboard section of this site.
NOTICEBOARD
First prize in an essay competition organised by St Michael’s Church in Melbourne Australia was welcome news. The theme was a theology of beauty for the twenty-first century and the winning essay was ’A First Philosophy of Objects’. To read it go to www.stmichaels.org.au
2009 has seen publication of two essays by Lesley Chamberlain on Heidegger, in Times Literary Supplement, May 15, and Standpoint October 2009. See www.tls.co.uk and www.standpointmag.co.uk A third essay will appear early in 2010
An essay on the history of the word ’quietism’ was published in Common Knowledge Spring 2009
Much of the year has been taken up with writing and travelling for A Shoe Story, a journey in the history of ideas that via their responses to van Gogh looks at how Heidegger and Derrida gave us a new way of looking at art and humanity which, hard though it may be to accept, chimes with the posthumanist twenty-first century.
Work on a novel continues, as well as occasional reviewing the Times Literary Supplement, The New Statesman and The Independent.
The Philosophy Steamer, renamed as Lenin’s Private War (St Martins), and Motherland A Philosophical History of Russia (The Rookery Press) appeared in the US in May 2007, and St Martins has followed up with a paperback. Both have been widely and enthusiastically reviewed.
From the reviews:
’The persecution of free-spirited intellectuals and artists in the Soviet era has become, in many respects, a familar tale. Numberless novels and memoirs have described, in nightmarish detail, the varied forms of coercion and punishment it adopted -- whether in Josef Stalin’s prison camps or Leonid Brezhnev’s psychiatric hospitals, through public shaming or private harassment. Yet there is an episode in this chronicle which is less widely known, even though it occurred at the very beginning. With her new book, ’The Philosophy Steamer’, Lesley Chamberlain makes an irrefutable case for its significance in the intellectual history of 20th-century Europe.’ Oliver Ready The Moscow Times, August 11, 2006
’Those who sailed on The Philosophy Steamer, the countless others whose names have not been remembered -they were like a mythical tribe from a lost world. Chamberlain retrieves their stories in a narrative, that is compelling, laudibly unsentimental and deeply significant to the history of ideas.’ Frances Stonor Saunders The Guardian 29 April, 2006
’Lesley Chamberlain has a rare gift for animating philosophy through intensely human stories...she movingly describes the expeience of exile in ways that echo the great exiled novelist Nabokov himself.’ Michael Burleigh The Sunday Telegraph March 12, 2006
Motherland, which currently has four stars on amazon.com, was expertly and critically reviewed by Prof. Caryl Emerson in the journal Common Knowledge Vol.12 Issue 2, Spring 2006. Prof. Emerson begins: ’The thesis of this lucid, partisan book is that "Russia was never in a Western, Cartesian sense a culture of reason, but in all its philosophical forms it was a culture of hope."
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has meanwhile noted: ’We’ve said goodbye to certain philosophical traditions like logical positivisim, without finding any overarching system that might replace that. And in that respect, as Lesley Chamberlain points out in her excellent recent work on Russian intellectual history, because of that there is more room for adventurous intellectual discussion than perhaps there was 20 years ago in the West. The ways in which thinkers like Losev, Bakhtin, [Sergei] Bulgakov can be brought into confrontation with elements in the modern West, confrontation and fruitful relation as well, I think argues a very promising future, because we do need conversations about what is essentially human. We do need...effective ways of drawing the distinction between the personal and the individual. We do need accounts of human solidarity that are not either trivial or totalitarian. The Russian tradition is rich, sometimes over-rich, in answers to these conundrums.’ from a talk given in London to the Great Britain-Russia Society, Dec.7, 2005
For specific reviews of these books please see individual publications and/or contact the author or Atlantic Books.
For interviews with the author and her most recent articles and broadcast talks see the Archive page of this site.
EXTERNAL LINKS
Some of the links below are to a home page. In these cases, e.g the Radio 3 link, you will need to use the search facility to find the appropriate page
Find a Guardian profile of Lesley Chamberlain at www.darwinwars.com/blogcuts/2000/03/25/lesley_chamberlain.html
Find her TLS reviews at http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,25332,00.html
Find her Independent reviews at http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/
Find her Radio 3 talks at www.bbc.co.uk/radio3
Find her latest books at www.groveatlantic.co.uk/">
Find her food articles for Slow The Journal of the Slow Food Movement at http://editore.slowfood.com/editore/eng/slow.lasso
Find her reprinted cookery books at www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/bookinfo/5043.html
and www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/bookinfo/5044.html
lvc
lesleychamberlain.co.uk