The Fantastical Daybook of Vladislav Davidzon
What is the Daybook?
This publication is a literary, aesthetic and political travel daybook written by the artist, diarist, critic, producer and journalist Vladislav Davidzon. It is the online manifestation of the eclectic and baroque private visual journals of a wandering aesthete and flâneur. Every missive will begin with the reproduction of a diary page, painting or drawing, and will be followed by a diary entry or musing on art culture or literature,
The daybook/Diary is a very private effusion, it is a reaction to a life of obsessive care about (as well as travel to) art. The focus of the daybook is on visual and literary culture, travel and history - and crucially in the ways that they intersect with politics. Especially in Central and Eastern Europe. Having reported from Odessa and Kyiv for more than a decade, Davidzon has written two books about Ukraine and Ukrainian culture: “The Birth of a Political Nation” and “From Odessa With Love” -Thus many of the diary entries and essays will deal with responses to developments in Eastern European culture and arts. Davidzon has for years reported from all around Europe as a roving correspondent.
The daybook will reflect on new trends in art, literature, criticism and politics.
It will never be boring!
“He has spent considerable energy compiling- not a book - but rather a daybook that filled enormous albums whose pages sagged and swelled with overlapping items, a never-ending scrapbook in which everything came together like an exquisite corpse of which he was the sole author: calligraphied haikus and aphorisms, glued paper cutouts, candid photos, detail from a painting, a fragment of a comic strip, a quote plucked from his mind at dawn or in the midst of sleeplessness, an outline for an article, a fallen leaf, a stamp, a calligram, a geometric shape, an expression of admiration, the first words of a curse, a cat’s head, a silly sketch à la Rimbaud stuck to a Warholian laundry ticket—all assembled into a caricature of a book (like Mallarmé’s The Book)” - Bernard-Henri Lévy
Who is your Humble Correspondent?
“Born in Tashkent, raised in Moscow and New York City, an editor in Odessa, a correspondent in Paris, there seems nowhere Davidzon hasn’t been and no one he hasn’t met. The result is a distinctive voice and eye, an eclectic mix of the cultural critic, the political analyst, and the liberal cosmopolitan.” -- – Mark Galeotti, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London
"He is a literary critic whose prose is built to tell a story. As a result, his essays often drift into the realm of the absurd. - Anthony Bartaway, The Atlantic Council
“Vladislav Davidzon is a modern addition to the great literary tradition of Ukraine’s most sophisticated city, Odessa. He is a trenchant and witty observer of life, arts, and politics in Odessa and Ukraine at large” -- – Thomas de Waal, Senior Fellow, Carnegie Europe
“He has the air of disheveled dandy, a cross between Truman Capote in Bennett Miller’s movie and the suspendered Balzac in Nadar’s famous photograph….The straight Oscar Wilde, converted overnight into the most curious, intrepid, and acute of war reporters without ever giving up the stylish pouch he wore with the bullet-proof vest, without forgoing his matching jacket and socks, and, above all, without sacrificing anything of his humor and composure”. Bernard Henri Levy, French intellectual.
“A carnivalesque and fantastical figure- Dressed like an Edwardian dandy, in silk socks and bright trousers, maybe even wearing a boater of the type that Venetian gondoliers perch on their heads as they croon down the canals, he speaks in a transatlantic drawlAt first I thought the whole thing was an act, someone playing at a reincarnation of an early 20th century American in Paris. But it wasn’t an act! It was Vladislav Davidzon!” -Peter Pomerantsev, journalist and author.
Davidzon is a long time commentator on Russian, Belarus and Ukrainian politics.
He is a long time contributing writer for Foreign Policy Magazine.
This is a sampling of the criticism and reportage that he has written as longtime European Culture Correspondent of Tablet Magazine. Here you can find his front line reportage.
For ten years, he wrote a riotous Cannes Film Festival Diary.
His writing can also be found in numerous publications including:
The Wall Street Journal, The New Statesman, BookForum, The New York Post, The Spectator, The Kyiv Post, UnHerd, Washington Examiner, Ha’aretz, The Critic, The Bulwark.
Biography
Davidzon was born into a mixed Jewish/Ukrainian/Russian family in Tashkent, which was then the vibrant and cosmopolitan capital of Soviet Central Asia. The city was the capital of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Uzbekistan. The ancient city had offered his Belarus and Ukrainian born grandparents safe haven from Hitler’s onslaught at the outbreak of the the second World War. The family would reside in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic for the next fifty years of Soviet life. They were Soviet intelligentsia who were on the periphery of the Soviet ruling nomenclature elite, half of them artists and scientists and the other half members of the Soviet apparatchik nomenklatura. The Russian grandmother that raised him was born before World War Two in Batumi, Georgia (when it was still a sleepy fishing village in Soviet Georgia, before Georgian President Saakashvilli would turn it for the better or worse into Las Vegas on the Black Sea ). His grandmother was born to a Russified Mordvin officer in the former Russian imperial army. When he was almost five years old, Davidzon’s family relocated to Moscow. For the next two years they waited for an exit visa - that is refugee status -in America.
The family arrived in New York City in August of 1991 on the very last commercial flight out of the Soviet Union - just as Gorbachev and Yeltsin were breaking up the Communist hard-liner coup and initiating the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The eventful and dramatic flight from the collapsing Soviet Empire would presage the course of his peripatetic and venturous life.
Davidzon grew up around mobsters, artists and intellectuals in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach neighborhood and studied at art school. As well as at Universities in New York City, Paris, Brussels and Venice. He now divides his time teaching, writing, reporting and making art between New York, Ukraine and Paris.
Why subscribe?
By subscribing you will help support Davidzon’s literary and cultural reportage, and you will receive sparkling weekly missives, reviews, opinions and political commentary as well as updates from a very fun, intense and committed life!
Founding Members at the $250 level will get the chance to take a walk with him or have coffee whenever they are in the same time.
Subscribers will also have access to special material, posts, events, podcasts, interviews, private Zooms- as well as privately mailed post art and postcards!
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