Dostoevsky’s Vision
Forty years before, Dostoevsky had predicted that socialism would cost Russia 100 million victims….if Dostoevsky erred, it was on the side of understatement: from 1917 to 1959, socialism cost the Soviet Union 110 million lives!…
Tag: Fyodor Dostoevsky
For Everything and Everyone
My friends, ask gladness from God. Be glad as children, as birds in the sky. And let man’s sin not disturb you in your efforts, do not fear that it will dampen your endeavor and…
If Only…
Grushenka’s fable is in fact a parabolic gloss on Zosima’s often repeated aphorism that all are responsible for all. Had the old peasant woman not kicked away the other sinners who were clinging to her…
All-time Greats
By the novel of ideas I mean realist fiction, focused on the complexities of human psychology and the social conditions peculiar to a specific time and place, that tests theories by examining the sources of…
Take Your Pick
What is the essence of Christ’s ministry? He teaches men “not to commit stupidities.” All of Tolstoy’s brutal empiricism and aristocratic impatience resound in that extraordinary answer. The Dostoevskyan Christ, on the contrary, teaches men…
Today’s One-Liner (#318)
When the work of art invades our consciousness, something within us catches flame. –George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism, 45
Today’s One-Liner (#310)
Everyone should read at one point in his life Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. –James Schall, S.J., A Student’s Guide to Liberal Learning, 34
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….
She Gave an Onion
Dostoevsky was concerned lest his depiction be considered blasphemous, and he thus includes in his postscript “one small nota bene: please don’t imagine that I would allow myself, in a work of mine, even the…