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…
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
Marginalia are the immediate indices of the reader’s response to the text, of the dialogue between the book and himself. –George Steiner, No Passion Spent Essays 1978 — 1995
In a more general vein: that which we know by heart will ripen and deploy within us. The memorized text interacts with our temporal existence, modifying our experiences, being dialectically modified by them. The stronger…
Marginalia are the immediate indices of the reader’s response to the text, of the dialogue between the book and himself. –George Steiner, “The Uncommon Reader” Susan Sontag, with Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
“A fine teacher, but didn’t publish.” –Quoted by George Steiner, in Lessons of the Masters, p. 33. Steiner observes, “A cardinal definition of genius points, I believe, to the capacity to originate myths, to devise…
Countless former prisoners described how memorized verse consoled them. It preserved their past life and their continuity with it. And it was something the authorities could not take away. Once stories about prisoners reciting poetry…
There is nothing in mere scholarship. The object of study is to find means of knowing God and realizing Him. A holy man had a book. When asked what it contained, he opened it and…
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…
April 6, 2005 Dear Andrew, I recently finished a small book by Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, and it made me think of many conversations we’ve had over the past couple of years. So…