Dostoevsky’s Vision
Forty years before, Dostoevsky had predicted that socialism would cost Russia 100 million victims….if Dostoevsky erred, it was on the side of understatement: from 1917 to 1959, socialism cost the Soviet Union 110 million lives!…
Category: Russia
For Everything and Everyone
My friends, ask gladness from God. Be glad as children, as birds in the sky. And let man’s sin not disturb you in your efforts, do not fear that it will dampen your endeavor and…
From Russia to India
In the East, and especially in India, Tolstoy’s beliefs seem still to be very much alive. Gandhi regarded himself as a humble follower, and his tremendously effective civil disobedience campaign stemmed in large measure from…
In Service to the Revolution
In the twenties, young people of education willingly gathered information for the authorities and the secret police, and thought they were doing so for “the good of the Revolution,” for the sake of the mysterious…
Today’s One-Liner (#319)
Courage and victory come to us only when we resolve to make sacrifices. –Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, We Have Ceased To See the Purpose: Essential Speeches, 20
Today’s One-Liner (#318)
When the work of art invades our consciousness, something within us catches flame. –George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism, 45
Present Moment, Awesome Moment
Goethe once said that during eighty years of life he had known eleven happy days. I imagine that everyone, in the course of their life, must have seen many hundreds of sunrises and sunsets; they…
Today’s One-Liner (#310)
Everyone should read at one point in his life Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. –James Schall, S.J., A Student’s Guide to Liberal Learning, 34
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…
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….