Tag: Vasily Grossman

Just Taking Care of the Kulaks

“All these words had their effect on me too. I was only a girl—and during meetings and special briefings, from films, books, articles, and radio broadcasts, from Stalin himself, I kept hearing one and the…

Memory Multitudes

During the night he went through his vast store of memories. He remembered the hundreds of people who had passed through his life. He remembered pupils and teachers, friends and enemies. He remembered books and…

The Blood-stained Face of History

Could this really be socialism—with the labor camps of Kolyma, with the horrors of collectivization, with the cannibalism and the millions of deaths during the famine? Yes, there were times when a very different understanding…

Russian Reflections on Kindness

1. When nineteenth-­century novelists exposed the hy­poc­risy of cruel ­people pretending to be kind, observed Nadezhda Mandelstam, they testified to the unquestioned ac­cep­tance of kindness as a virtue. As La Rochefoucauld observed, hy­poc­risy is the…

What’s Missing

During the thousand years of her history Russia had seen many great things. During the Soviet period the country had seen global military victories, vast construction sites, whole new cities, dams across the Dnieper and…

Reading Jewish

In 1994, I purchased Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, and would peruse it from time to time, and pick a book off of Bloom’s four lists.    He got me back to Shakespeare  and sparked…

Of Course, A Russian Would Say This

A book is a square chunk of hot, smoking conscience–and nothing else!–Boris Pasternak, quoted in Gary Saul Morson,  Wonder Confronts Certainty:  Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter

It’s Simple

 He was not trying to convince me of anything. He spoke with sorrow about people’s reluctance to follow life’s most important law—that you should wish for others what you wish for yourself; that you should…

The Soul’s Secret

For a moment this sense of [Sofya Levinton’s]  past blotted out everything present, blotted out the abyss. It was the very strangest of feelings, something you could never share with any other person—not even your…