Engagingly Readable
Dostoevsky is not a writer to struggle through or with, but one who tries to make his work as interesting and exciting—and as readable—as possible. His works raise some of the deepest moral and philosophic…
Category: Russia
Today’s One-Liner (#303)
Every time you pray, if your prayer is sincere, there will be new feeling and new meaning in it, which will give you fresh courage, and you will understand that prayer is an education….
A Horse’s Soul Is…
Horses always seem utterly inscrutable. Even when they laugh or weep, they look quite imperturbable. All the horse’s powers of expression have gone into its parts: these are never still for a minute, twitching, twirling…
Today’s One-Liner (#302)
A novel is a trap, a maze into which we are drawn by the plot until we are swallowed up by the narrative, becoming its prisoner and confidante. –Abram Tertz, A Voice from the Chorus,…
Warning
Some thinkers have sadly concluded that the enchantment Nadezhda Mandelstam recognized in the word revolution, “to which whole nations have succumbed,” continues to bewitch intellectuals. In his argument with dissident scientist Andrei Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn accused…
Today’s One-Liner (#301)
Tolstoy and other classic writers deemed it their duty to curse prison, but Solzhenitsyn, who served time in conditions those writers could not have begun to imagine, can “say without hesitation: ‘Bless you, prison, for…
A Personal Bible
Tolstoy wrote little in 1910 but considerable effort went into completing For Every Day, the compilation of quotations from great authors arranged so as to illustrate the development of his own philosophy of life, a…
Today’s One-Liner (#299)
The distance we have gone is less important than the direction in which we are going. –Leo Tolstoy, Spiritual Writings, edited Charles E. Moore
Just Taking Care of the Kulaks
“All these words had their effect on me too. I was only a girl—and during meetings and special briefings, from films, books, articles, and radio broadcasts, from Stalin himself, I kept hearing one and the…
Today’s One-Liner (#291)
In the West, too, appeared The Gulag Archipelago, his monumental three-volume exposé of the Soviet slave-labor system which single-handedly destroyed what remained of Western illusions about the great Communist experiment. –Joseph Epstein, Life Sentences: Literary…