Tag: Vasily Grossman

What Makes for an Impressive Person

Meetings with famous people can—as we have seen—be disappointing. Someone very gifted, even a true genius, can turn out to be a very ordinary person indeed. His talent is separate from his soul. And you…

Tolstoy/Grossman

[Russian] writers have  decried Russia’s slavery and violent past.—Alexandra Popoff, Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century Reading [Leo] Tolstoy strengthened [Vasily] Grossman’s ambition to become a writer. Tolstoy’s interest in the human soul, his quest…

Mother and Son

There was one other constant in Viktor’s life, a quiet light that illuminated his whole inner world. It was his mother who had given him this light, but he did not realize this. She felt…

Why Read Dostoevsky

It was never my goal to put together a collection of horror stories, to overwhelm the reader. I was collecting the human. Dostoevsky asked the question: “How much of the human is there in a…

Senseless Kindness

Yes, as well as this terrible Good with a capital ‘G’, there is every day human kindness. The kindness of an old woman carrying a piece of bread to a prisoner, the kindness of a…

Cheer Up: Reminders

Furnace. The first evening, about 5 o’clock, the pain from the extreme heat, exhaustion, and headaches make me completely lose control of my movements. I can’t lower the furnace damper. A coppersmith jumps up and…

Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky’s art is literally prophetic. He is not prophetic in the sense of predicting the future, but in a  truly biblical sense, for he untiringly denounces the fall of the people of God back into…

Never Undemanding of Ourselves

John Garrard and Carol Garrard, The Bones of Berdichev:  The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman Wednesday 1 August 2012 Vasily Grossman represents an inspiring figure of engagement, and old fashioned Russian insistence on telling…

Summer Reading List

Sholem Asch Yankev Glatshteyn Vasily Grossman Malka Heifetz-Tussman Dovid Katz Irina Klepfisz Koheleth Kadia Molodovsky Leib Rochman Chava Rosenfarb