Category: Dissidents

Today’s One-Liner (#55)

The meaning of life lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but in the development of the soul. –Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, First Things, August/September 2024, p. 70,

Thus Spoke a Chinese Dissident

There is no revolution like the Communist revolution. You simply burn all the books, kill all of the thinking people and use the poor proletariat to create a very simple benchmark to gauge social change….

The Chutzpah!

 [Thomas] Sowell’s habit of challenging liberal orthodoxies that are held dear by most of his fellow intellectuals  and the mainstream media has led to a good deal of criticism over the decades. This book explores…

We Inter-Are/1

What I mostly feel in myself is my father and mother, you, Yegor, Pushkin, Gogol. A whole crowd. They all colour my perception of reality, share my destiny and go with me wherever I am…

Not Now… But Someday

[Soviet critics] conceded that much of what [Vasily] Grossman had written was true, but to publish the novel at such a time would be harmful to the state. Marlov or Sartakov suggested that publication might…

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…

Russians Reciting Poetry as Prayer

Countless former prisoners described how memorized verse consoled them. It preserved their past life and their continuity with it. And it was something the authorities could not take away.  Once stories about prisoners reciting poetry…

Regarding the Dreyfus Affair

“It is my duty to speak up; I will not be an accessory to the fact.  If I were, my nights would be haunted by the spectre of that innocent man so far away, suffering…

In the Old Days

“You see that old man? He’s from my father’s village. I met him years ago, when I was young. I only met him twice. He just told me he was concerned about me, so he…