Category: World Literature

Engagingly Readable

Dostoevsky is not a writer to struggle through or with, but one who tries to make his work as interesting and exciting—and as readable—as possible. His works raise some of the deepest moral and philosophic…

Today’s One-Liner (#303)

Every time you pray, if your prayer is sincere, there will be new feeling and new meaning in it,   which will give you fresh courage, and you will understand that prayer is an education….

Today’s One-Liner (#302)

A novel is a trap, a maze into which we are drawn by the plot until we are swallowed up by the narrative, becoming  its prisoner and confidante.  –Abram Tertz,  A Voice from the Chorus,…

Warning

Some thinkers have sadly concluded that the enchantment Nadezhda Mandelstam recognized in the word revolution, “to which ­whole nations have succumbed,” continues to bewitch intellectuals. In his argument with dissident scientist Andrei Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn accused…

Today’s One-Liner (#301)

Tolstoy and other classic writers deemed it their duty to curse prison, but Solzhenitsyn, who served time in conditions ­those writers could not have begun to imagine, can “say without hesitation: ‘Bless you, prison, for…

A Personal Bible

Tolstoy wrote little in 1910 but considerable effort went into completing For Every Day, the compilation of quotations from great authors arranged so as to illustrate the development of his own philosophy of life, a…

Today’s One-Liner (#293)

This is that conquest of the world and of ourselves, which has been always considered as the perfection of human nature; and this is only to be obtained by fervent prayer, steady resolution, and frequent…

Today’s One-Liner (#291)

In the West, too, appeared The Gulag Archipelago, his monumental three-volume exposé of the Soviet slave-labor system which single-handedly destroyed what remained of Western illusions about the great Communist experiment. –Joseph Epstein, Life Sentences: Literary…

Catholic Jack

As Kerouac aged, he reclaimed the Catholic identity he had inherited from his devout parents, although to the reader, the influence was often muffled under the Benzedrine and booze-fueled bacchanalia of his youth, especially when…