The Voice Over

5.  Anna Akhmatova meant her oral memoirs—stories she repeated over the years, without making any changes, to various interlocutors.

6.  Translation from ‘I Am a Phenomenon Quite Out of the Ordinary’: The Notebooks, Diaries, and Letters of Daniil Kharms, selected, translated and edited by Anthony Anemone and Peter Scotto (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013), 83.

THE LAST HERO

1.  Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 109.

2.  Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964–1980, ed. David Rieff (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 518.

3.  Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn, 176.

4.  Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, 144.

5.  Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–1963, ed. David Rieff (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 6–7.

6.  Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, 217.

7.  Susan Sontag, “A Mind in Mourning,” The Times Literary Supplement, February 25, 2000.

8.  Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, 426, 115, 183, 106, 426.

9.  Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, 424.

10.  Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 119.

11.  Sontag, Reborn, 34.

12.  Sontag, Reborn, 81.

13.  Sigrid Nunez, Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag (New York: Riverhead, 2011), 87.

14.  Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, 515.

15.  Larry Kramer in an interview to Larry Mass, as quoted in Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock, Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 268.

16.  Nunez, Sempre Susan, 74.

17.  Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, 146.

18.  Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, 447.

19.  A modified quotation from her essay on Elias Canetti, “Mind as Passion,” in Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn, 183.

20.  Solomon Volkov, Conversations with Joseph Brodsky, trans. Marian Schwartz (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 71.

FROM THAT SIDE

1.  See note 7 to the essay “The Last Hero.”

2.  In 2006, a Russian translation of Austerlitz was published but went almost unnoticed. It was not until 2015 that the effort to bring Sebald’s work to Russian readers was renewed, with the publication of his book of essays On the Natural History of Destruction. In 2018, Sebald’s novels Vertigo and The Rings of Saturn came out in Russian translation for the first time, and Austerlitz was republished.

3.  “Iosif” was Stalin’s first name, and it was given to Soviet children in his honor. The name “Vladlen” derives from “Vladimir Lenin,” and Oktyabrina honors October, the month when the Bolshevik revolution happened.

4.  W. G. Sebald, A Place in the Country, trans. Jo Catling (New York: Random House, 2013), 142, 130.

5.  W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2001), 182–83.

6.  A phrase from Maxim Gorky’s novel The Life of Klim Samgin that became proverbial.

7.  Sebald, A Place in the Country, 136.

8.  Final lines from Osip Mandelstam’s poem “I have not heard the tales of Ossian” (“Ia ne slykhal rasskazov Ossiana,” 1914).

9.  W. G. Sebald, Campo Santo, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2005), 137, 157.

10.  Sebald, Campo Santo, 160.

11.  Sebald, A Place in the Country, 177.

12.  W. G. Sebald, Vertigo, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 2000), 51.

13.  The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W. G. Sebald, ed. Lynne Sharon Schwartz (New York: Seven Stories, 2007), 67.

14.  Sebald, Austerlitz, 180.

15.  Osip Mandelstam, Selected Essays, trans. Sidney Monas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977), 181.

16.  W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1996), 3.

17.  Sebald, Austerlitz, 3.

18.  Sebald, Austerlitz, 112.

19.  Sebald uses this term in two of his conversations (with Eleanor Wachtel and with Joseph Cuomo): The Emergence of Memory, 40, 102–103.

20.  Sebald, A Place in the Country, 130–31.