Ellopos

	Orestes Kanellis The Child with the Heliotrope (ca. 1948)
	George Jakobides The Refugee Girl
	Dimitrios Galanis The Child with the Mechanical Horse (1921)
	Niki Karagatsi Dimitris with Helmet (1974)
	Nikephoros Lytras The Carol-Singers
	Ioannis Zacharias The Student (1868)
	Othon Pervolarakis Dimitris P. Studying (ca. 1930)
	George Sikeliotis Mother Playing with Child (1951-60)
	Yannis Moralis Pregnant Woman (1948)
	A. Tassos Composition with Mother and Child (1963)

Features

Christiaan Stange's
DOSTOEVSKY RESEARCH STATION.

The Anxiety of Prosperity

Conservatives are comfortable when the maladies they identify can be attributed to the overreach of government. But when problems originate from outside the political sphere, they tend to follow impassioned denunciations with an odd silence. This has been particularly true of conservative critics of capitalism. Daniel Bell ended Cultural Contradictions by calling for the development of a new public philosophy, one which would seem to involve a greater role for the state, but he strenuously avoided mentioning the state or specifying its role. Elsewhere he and others, including Novak and Kristol, have made hopeful predictions of a new Great Awakening, which is usually vague in its theological content but consistent in its rejection of excessive materialism. D’Souza echoes this hope with talk of an imminent "spiritual renewal." He is more optimistic than most, believing that this renewal will be engendered by prosperity itself, which has made possible the luxury of reflecting on its inadequacies. But this talk is ultimately only speculative. All conservative social critics run up against a fundamental barrier: that the principal instrument at our disposal for achieving social change is the state. And the state, for a variously weighted combination of its inefficacy and its coercive tendencies, is more horrible to conservatives than the cultural deficiencies they lament. This dilemma has not disappeared with the new affluence, nor is it likely to be resolved any time soon.

The return of decoration

After the death of Queen Victoria, ornamental architecture fell into disrepute. A century later, Giles Worsley sees signs of revival.

The Culture of Liberty

By M.V. Llosa

In reality, globalization does not suffocate local cultures but rather liberates them from the ideological conformity of nationalism.

Illicit love

What marks Tristan as a work of its time is the crime that the lovers commit; the intensity of illicit love is intense because illicit - it is not "normal" to feel so much. Hans Sachs - perhaps Wagner's only truly sympathetic character, and just a man - will mock boundless love in Die Meistersinger. But in Tristan, Wagner sought to express Eros without restraint in an era when people believed in moral discipline. No transforming love without transgression, then: this was the conundrum written out in the pages of Anna Karenina, sounded out in this amazing opera.

Philhellene's progress: Patrick Leigh Fermor

Very often, wandering in the wilder parts of Greece, the traveller is astonished in semi-abandoned chapels . . . by the subtlety with which the painter has availed himself of the sparse elbow-room for private inspiration that the formulae of Byzantine iconography allow him: a convention so strict that it was finally codified by a sixteenth-century painter-monk called Dionysios of Phourna. He formalized the tradition of centuries into an iconographic dogma and deviation became, as it were, tantamount to schism. He it was who made the army of saints and martyrs and prophets identifiable at once by certain unvarying indices— the cut and growth of saints’ beards, their fall in waves or ringlets, their smooth flow or their shagginess. . . . He regulated—it was more the ratification of old custom than the launching of new fiats—the wings that anomalously spring from the shoulder blades of St. John Prodromos, and placed his head on a charger in his hands as well as on his neck. He stipulated the angle at which a timely sapling, springing from the ground, should redeem the nakedness of St. Onouphrios from scandal.

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