Specks and Seeds
Incidentally, I have already mentioned that although he lost his mother in his fourth year, he remembered her afterwards all his life, her face, her caresses, “as if she were standing alive before me.” Such…
Category: Russia
From Fyodor Dostoevsky to Thich Nhat Hanh
“Compassion will give meaning and understanding to Rogozhin himself. Compassion is the chief and perhaps only law of being for all mankind.”—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot Please call me by my true name,so that I can…
We Inter-Are/1
What I mostly feel in myself is my father and mother, you, Yegor, Pushkin, Gogol. A whole crowd. They all colour my perception of reality, share my destiny and go with me wherever I am…
Of Course, A Russian Would Say This
A book is a square chunk of hot, smoking conscience–and nothing else!–Boris Pasternak, quoted in Gary Saul Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter
Not the Pat Answer
Father Zosima then advises his suppliant, in some of the words that Father Ambrose of Optina Pustyn asked Dostoevsky to convey to Anna Grigoryevna: “Be not comforted. Consolation is not what you need. Weep and…
It’s Simple
He was not trying to convince me of anything. He spoke with sorrow about people’s reluctance to follow life’s most important law—that you should wish for others what you wish for yourself; that you should…
The Soul’s Secret
For a moment this sense of [Sofya Levinton’s] past blotted out everything present, blotted out the abyss. It was the very strangest of feelings, something you could never share with any other person—not even your…
Remember to Remember
The following is the conclusion to Leo Tolstoy’s short story “Three Questions”— Remember that there is only one important time and that is now. The present moment is the only time over which we have…
Be a Light
Then coming to this pass [Ryōkan] found only one way to go: he made up his mind, to go his own way, that is to say, to pursue the way of truth—the only way a…
Here and Now, This Is It
In another passage of the letter to his brother, he defines the ecstatic sense of life that he felt on being pardoned: “Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute could be a lifetime…