Blinded
I did not know the light and I thought there was no truth in life. But having become convinced that people could only live by this light, I began to seek its source and I…
Category: Russia
Reckoning with Ourselves
I recently finished a course with my friends Dianne Lee and Martín Antonio Zaldívar-Barragán, “Reckoning with Russia, War, and Ourselves.” We read and discussed Tolstoy, Kuznetsov, Alexievich, and Politkovskaya. I invite you to check out…
Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky’s art is literally prophetic. He is not prophetic in the sense of predicting the future, but in a truly biblical sense, for he untiringly denounces the fall of the people of God back into…
An Odious Comparison?
Norman Mailer once related a story he came across: Somewhere around the turn of the century, Chekhov visits Tolstoy. He takes the train to the nearest station. Let’s say it’s wintertime. He rents two horses…
Tolstoy Summer
✓ A Confession and Other Religious Writings (Penguin) ✓ The Gospel in Brief: The Life of Jesus (Harper Perennial) ✓ Hadji Murat (translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky) ✓ The Kingdom of God Is within You…
So, Which Is It?
My friend Andrew Wimmer texted me the following two lines… [Paul] Street’s dementia: “the Kremlin [is] in the grip of a megalomaniacal neofascist…” Stephen F. Cohen on accusations of fascism leveled against Putin: “absurd.” Street…
Reckoning with Russia, War, and Ourselves: A Spring-Summer Class
War presented itself to him only as a matter of subjecting himself to danger, to the possibility of death, and thereby earning awards, and the respect of his comrades here and of his friends in…
A Basic Seventeen
November 1999 “And so, first of all, let us remember him, gentlemen, all our lives. And even though we may be involved with the most important affairs, achieve distinction or fall into some great misfortune…
Recent Reading
Sunday 11 April 2021 Dear Sarah, Thanks for your question about what I’ve been reading. Sometimes I make a plan, then other times I act entirely on instinct. So what follows are examples of each….
Reading/743
Both M. and Akhmatova had the astonishing ability of somehow bridging time and space when they read the work of dead poets. By its very nature, such reading is usually anachronistic, but with them it…