Who Remained Decent?
So let us ask: who behaved better under pressure, imprisoned Bolsheviks or religious believers? Materialists or those who acknowledged absolute standards of good and evil? Who acted nobly and who behaved like a scoundrel? To…
Category: Russia
Advice for Those Who Say They Want to Save the World
Above all, avoid lies, all lies, especially the lie to yourself. Keep watch on your own lie and examine it every hour, every minute. And avoid contempt, both of others and of yourself: what seems…
Sanctity of Life
[Vladimir] Lenin repeatedly expressed utter contempt for the “moral minimum” idea, and his reasoning became the Soviet position on ethics, taught to generations of schoolchildren. To prefer “the smallest number of victims,” “a minimum of…
Elimination
“Total destruction… the orchard, apiary, destruction of hives, bees buzzing despairingly, the men blow up hives with gunpowder… attack the hives, a wild orgy…I feel sick about it all,” [Isaac Babel] wrote in the diary, and one Red…
The Path of the Prosaic
for Natalie Long Faith comes not from theory but from experience, from the bottom up, by living the right sort of life from moment to moment. For Zossima, that means attending to the prosaic. One…
Reading the Russians
In this book I portray the Russian tradition as a dialogue of the dead (and a few still living) extending over centuries. Novelists and their characters, critics and ideologists, argue about ultimate questions that obsessed…
What Makes for an Impressive Person
Meetings with famous people can—as we have seen—be disappointing. Someone very gifted, even a true genius, can turn out to be a very ordinary person indeed. His talent is separate from his soul. And you…
Tolstoy/Grossman
[Russian] writers have decried Russia’s slavery and violent past.—Alexandra Popoff, Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century Reading [Leo] Tolstoy strengthened [Vasily] Grossman’s ambition to become a writer. Tolstoy’s interest in the human soul, his quest…
Lies
And therefore I think the solution I have found for myself will be valid for all sincere men who set themselves the same question. First of all, to the question: What must we do? I…
Mother and Son
There was one other constant in Viktor’s life, a quiet light that illuminated his whole inner world. It was his mother who had given him this light, but he did not realize this. She felt…