“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
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…
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
There were once many kind people, and even unkind ones pretended to be good because that was the thing to do. Such pretense was the source of the hypocrisy and dishonesty so much exposed in…
“And I shall also tell you, dear mother, that each of us is guilty in everything before everyone, and I most of all.” –Markel, in Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. –Staretz Zosima, “Of Prayer, Love, and the Touching of Other Worlds,” in Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov Easter morning 2012, Chouteau AvenuePhoto by Andrew Wimmer
Karamazov, s’écria Kolia, est-ce vrai ce que dit la religion, que nous ressusciterons d’entre les morts, que nous nous reverrons les uns les autres, et tous, et Ilioucha ? Oui, c’est vrai, nous ressusciterons, nous…
The meaning of life lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but in the development of the soul. –Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, First Things, August/September 2024, p. 70,
Dostoevsky says that we are all responsible for everything, before everyone, and I more than all the others. –Emmanuel Levinas, Is It Righteous to Be?
However little education a man may have, he cannot but know that Christ did not sanction murder, but taught kindness, meekness, forgiveness of injuries, love of one’s enemies—and therefore he cannot help seeing that on…