Today’s One-Liner (#124)
It was not in vain that the ancient Fathers used to say: sit in your cell and it will teach you everything. –John B. Dunlap, Staretz Amvrosy, Model for Dostoevsky’s Staretz Zossima, 150
Category: Russia
Something I Came across in “First Things”
Alyosha Karamazov suffers tormenting doubt because the miracle he expected does not occur. But when he finds himself engaged in active love in consoling Grushenka, he discovers a faith that is compatible with uncertainty. That…
Today’s One-Liner (#103)
I accept the torment of accusation and of my disgrace before all, I want to suffer and be purified by suffering! –Dmitri Karamazov, in Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Today’s One-Liner (#96)
I boasted to Rakitin that I gave an onion, but I’ll say it differently to you: in my whole life I’ve given just one little onion, that’s how much good I’ve done. –Grushenka to Alyosha,…
Russian Reflections on Kindness
1. When nineteenth-century novelists exposed the hypocrisy of cruel people pretending to be kind, observed Nadezhda Mandelstam, they testified to the unquestioned acceptance of kindness as a virtue. As La Rochefoucauld observed, hypocrisy is the…
Reading “Job”
There were ample precedents in Dostoevsky’s work for his thematic focus on the problem of theodicy raised by Ivan—the problem of the existence of evil and suffering in a world presumably created by a God…
Maniacal Obstinacy
I often wonder whether I have in me a single gene or drop off blood inherited from my biblical ancestors, or even from the ghettos of the old Spanish and German cities. Who knows, perhaps…
Today’s One-Liner (#76)
“She has a rare quality of taking full responsibility in the moment for everything she does and says.” –Grigory Dashevsky, quoted in Maria Stepanova’s introduction to Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, Everyman’s Library, 2023
Saving One’s Own Skin in the Soviet Union
But it scarcely matters who actually signed the sentence–in those years everybody readily signed whatever was put before them. This was not only because they feared they would otherwise at once be dispatched to the…
Today’s One-Liner (#74)
Think, when you look at people, at their recent birth, their childhood, or their imminent death—and you will love them: such frail creatures. –Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky), A Voice from the Chorus