Clarity and Joy

«Clarity and Joy. A Book of Short Essays» – the second, corrected and supplemented edition of the eponymous book, first published in 2018. Mikhail Nemtsov – philosopher, historian, and writer. Born in 1980 in the south of Western Siberia. Author of poetry collections «Intellectualism» (Omsk, 2015), «Like in the Movies» (Riga, 2023), and the book «This is How We Learned to Talk About Death. Diary 2022–2023» (Chișinău, 2024). Loves paper books. Literary reviewer and critic Olga Balla: «…I am afraid to fall into exaggeration, but this is one of the most interesting, if not the most important books... Nemtsov's book brings us back to that very point of the beginning of philosophy, from where Socrates once began: there is still nothing, no answers to questions, there are not even questions themselves yet, but there is a concern about the foundations of life, which you do not yet know how to name, so you grope for them with any available means. Moreover, this point lies beyond philosophy as such (by the way, we will not encounter a single philosophical term here) – and at the same time it already is philosophy. Nemtsov literally shows how it is born. Poetry captures such things best. Nemtsov's meaningful practice shares many traits with it: both imagery and sensitivity to the momentary inner movements of the narrator and to how understanding of the human condition arises from the specific circumstances of the speaker – bodily, emotional, material. As for «clarity» and «joy» – in this case, they are not psychological categories. They are philosophical categories: two valid criteria of accomplished thought.»