When the end of one year is the beginning of the next, there is a hidden stoppage in this visible passage that makes time an intimate voice to remind us of what we have forgotten. This whispered voice is like that of the slow, mysterious songs that give a sun of light its moon of shadow. In every year that ends and surrenders to each year that begins, in a contiguous discontinuity, there is our will to measure, mark and change the time in us and us in time. This is how poets scan their verses so that the music leaps like a spark from a fire or a bird from a tree. There is an interval that we open only within ourselves to repeat the words of Paul Gauguin’s painting: ‘Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?’. 

The last volume of War and Peace was published in 1869, that is, 150 years ago. It is one of the great universal novels. A book for a varied reading public, this epic of Russian literature, a Matryoshka novel with many subplots within, was challenged from the outset. It has a full history, recounted here by Dan Ungurianu, a professor of Russian studies in New York. What he asks here is a persistent question: why is it so difficult to argue against War and Peace? In response, Ungurianu speaks of the book and its author, drawing a lively and precise portrait of Tolstoy.

In our time, memory, in its social and collective dimensions, has become a theme of public discussion, closely linked to violent, or even traumatic, historical events, from the Holocaust to 9/11. Today the possibility of turning memory into a literary device, like Proust, is reduced or even impossible: at this time individual memory, as a psychic mechanism, is confronted with its technological prostheses, e.g. smartphones, computers and the Internet, where all the memory in the world, which used to be represented in libraries and archives, is stored. Since memory and the manifestations of its hegemony (visible in the obsession with heritage, in the ceaseless inauguration of museums, and in the public agenda of celebrations and reflections) mark our time with a whiff of decadence, we devote to it ‘Subject’ of this issue of Electra.

Catherine Millet is a writer, a curator and the editor of the magazine Art Press, of which she was the founder. In 1968, she began as an art critic for the cultural weekly Lettres Françaises, under the editorship of Louis Aragon. It is one of this writer’s passages that Millet has selected for comment, making it a lever with which she raises her world. On the basis of the quotation from Aragon, whose lack of verbal propriety causes an erotic thrill, Millet – the author of The Sexual Life of Catherine M., the book that made her name among the general public – provocatively declares her infallibly controversial ideas on women and their relationship with men. In her commentary, Millet carries on a controversy marked by violent anathemas and virulent accusations, with echoes that are still present.

Abdellah Taïa is a Moroccan writer who has lived in Paris for twenty years. However, his vision of the Arab world, as he expresses it in his novels and in public, is not that of someone looking from a distance but of someone seeing from within. And on the basis of this meaningful familial and social experience of Morocco, he tries to destroy clichés, portraying a world that does not fit exactly with the way the West constructs it.

Several Lebanese artists volunteered their services during the war years and created camouflage military fatigues for the fighting militias. Their designs were catalogued in this book by Farid Sarroukh, a mediocre painter who was irked (but not surprised) by his colleagues’ eager collaboration with the militias.

When can an opinion be a crime? What are the limits to the freedom of expression? At what point does my freedom end because someone else’s begins? These questions have been raised in our times with an urgency that stems from the need to square the freedom of thought and of expression in public (nowadays on the social media as well) with the prevention of threats of whose danger and seriousness history makes us aware. On these clearly topical questions, the Spanish writer and journalist Francisco Alba and the Portuguese lawyer and criminologist Rui Patrício pen their ideas.

Electra challenged the highly-esteemed Brazilian writer, essayist and university lecturer, Silviano Santiago, to keep a diary for a period of time. In a serene and subtly disenchanted tone, he recorded certain points in his day-to-day life – actions, meetings, reflections, renewed visits to literary works – blending them with the tense political and cultural life of Bolsonaro’s Brazil.

‘Scoop’ is a new section of Electra that allows authors to unveil original, unpublished work. In this first ‘Scoop’, the highly-esteemed Indian photographer, painter and director Sarah Singh, who lives between India and New York, presents her next film, Alexandra, in words and images. She began to imagine this film, a ‘work in progress’, twelve years ago and is shooting it now. Alexandra, the feminine form of Alexander, symbolises the great undertaking of a woman director who wants to connect the distant past with the present.

Havana is celebrating the quincentenary of its foundation. For many, the city represents easy enjoyment, a flight from time, a mirage in the sea, music that never ends. The Cuban writer and journalist Carlos Manuel Álvarez, a regular contributor to newspapers such as The New York Times and El Pais lives outside Cuba. For him, when he went back to his city to enjoy himself, Havana had returned to being ‘a city full of untethered sadnesses’. He says, in addition, ‘The day in Cuba is still communist, but the night is ever more neoliberal. ’The evocation of Havana that he creates here is pervaded by an exuberant and melancholy memory and permeated by a wind that disperses the waves breaking against the Malecón seawall.

From a very early age till late in life, Churchill wrote in order to speak of the world, the United Kingdom, and himself. On one occasion, he declared that history would be generous to him, because he was going to write it. When the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the great victor in the Second World War, it brought attention to a literary oeuvre that is indispensable to an understanding of the man and the audacity of his deeds. Drawing on the “old lion’s” own books and those that many authors have written about him, the diplomat and historian Bernardo Futscher Pereira provides us with another portrait of Winston Churchill.

A contemporary city is usually seen as a civil, secular and profane space that contrasts with its religious and ritualised rural counterpart. However, the bonds between urban space and the phenomenon of religion were of great importance historically, and still today remain active in our ways of living city life. In the text that follows, Jörg Rüpke, a German university lecturer, vice-director of the Max Weber Centre, a religious studies specialist, and author of various publications on these topics, explains that ‘the relationship between city and religion is one full of tension’.

This section offers an analysis and interpretation of Pedro Costa’s latest film, Vitalina Varela, which is understood as ‘a narrative of wickedness’. Vitalina and Ventura may well be the representation of a ‘people of the shadows’ who form a vanguard, as Hannah Arendt already mentioned with regard to the figure of the refugee.

Walid Raad catalogues the images collected in the Portfolio for Electra 8 under the signature Farid Sarroukh, “a mediocre painter who was irked (but not surprised) by his colleagues’ eager collaboration with the militias”. As Fernando Pessoa and Jorge Luis Borges show, we are all the Other of Ourselves. These lines, which are in this magazine as if it were another, speak of Walid Raad – and it is of Farid Sarroukh, too, that we are speaking.

Unexceptional words are the best specimens for observation. They go unnoticed until you stare at them long enough to realize their endless ramifications. The word feedback is a case in point.

Being the product of a laid-back environment created by musicians and sound engineers, feedback has never had the smug undertones of other imported words that crumple the fabric of the Portuguese language. Lacking a quality that would secure it a place in the circles of cosmopolitan jargon, feedback originally became a commonplace word conveying a specific, unpleasant noise.