Man out of Time | Los Angeles Review of BooksMan out of Time<br>The travels and ecstasies of a Russian aesthete.<br>By Josh BillingsMay 27, 2026<br>Literary Criticism

Memoir & Essay

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

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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...