[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…
My name is Andrew Ivers. I’m a freelance editor and have been friends with Mark since he was my teacher at SLU. For the last fifteen years I’ve been reading my way through great works…
“Total destruction… the orchard, apiary, destruction of hives, bees buzzing despairingly, the men blow up hives with gunpowder… attack the hives, a wild orgy…I feel sick about it all,” [Isaac Babel] wrote in the diary, and one Red…
for Natalie Long Faith comes not from theory but from experience, from the bottom up, by living the right sort of life from moment to moment. For Zossima, that means attending to the prosaic. One…
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…
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…
Christ has no body now on earth but yours, No hands but yours, no feet but yours,Yours are the eyes through which is to look outChrist’s compassion to the world;Yours are the feet with which he…
You get quite different effects when people don’t know they’re being photographed.–Keith Johnstone, Impro