Advice for Those Who Say They Want to Save the World
Above all, avoid lies, all lies, especially the lie to yourself. Keep watch on your own lie and examine it every hour, every minute. And avoid contempt, both of others and of yourself: what seems…
Author: Mark J. Chmiel
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…
An “Epic” Share the Wealth, with Andrew Ivers
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…
Elimination
“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…
The Path of the Prosaic
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…
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…
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…
Our Hands
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…
Have We Reached Twelve Trillion Selfies Yet?
You get quite different effects when people don’t know they’re being photographed.–Keith Johnstone, Impro
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…