Scoffers and Seers
“They all laughed at him. Particularly a lieutenant-colonel….’I am a lieutenant-colonel,’ he said, ‘but I’ve never met any God in all my life. Where is He, your Christ? Has anyone ever seen Him?’ ‘I have,’…
Category: Russia
Writing Matters
This much the outsider can make out. He looks at the harrowing of Pushkin, at Gogol’s despair, at Dostoevsky’s term in Siberia, at Tolstoy’s volcanic struggle against censorship, or at the long catalogue of the…
Liberate Yourself by Examining and Analyzing
If we would only avoid deceiving ourselves, we would find out what to do, where to go, how to live, and do so with clarity. –Leo Tolstoy, Spiritual Writings, edited by Charles E. Moore Title…
Responding to a Pogrom
Violence was much on Tolstoy’s mind. Some eight months before Bryan’s visit a terrible pogrom against the Jews had occurred in Kishinyov. Horrified by this event, Tolstoy readily lent his name to a protest signed…
The Way It Looked in 1908
What you are doing, you do not for the people but for yourselves, to retain the position you occupy, a position you consider advantageous but which is really a most pitiful and abominable one. So …
Like Being in Warsaw in 1941
Merely to know that somewhere, far away, there are men who torture other men by inflicting all sorts of humiliations and inhuman degradations and sufferings on them; and for three months constantly to look on…
Circle of Influence
Men need but understand this: they need but stop troubling themselves about external and general matters, in which they are not free, and use but one hundredth part of the energy, which they employ on…
Two Alyoshas
Dostoevsky’s—There was something in him that told one, that convinced one (and it was so all his life afterwards) that he did not want to be a judge of men, that he would not take…
He Made an Impression
“God grant us more such Russian rogues,” Marya Dmitrievna suddenly mixed in vexedly. “He lived a week with us; we saw nothing but good from him,” she said. “Courteous, wise, just.” –Leo Tolstoy, Hadji…
The Miracle of Being Awake
Suddenly some force shoved him in the chest, in the side, choked his breath still more, he fell through the hole, and there, at the end of the hole, something lit up. What was done…