Sanctity of Life

[Vladimir] Lenin repeatedly expressed utter contempt for the “moral minimum” idea, and his reasoning became the Soviet position on ethics, taught to generations of schoolchildren. To prefer “the smallest number of victims,” “a minimum of…

Reading the Russians

In this book I portray the Russian tradition as a dialogue of the dead (and a few still living) extending over centuries. Novelists and their characters, critics and ideologists, argue about ultimate questions that obsessed…