In Service to the Revolution
In the twenties, young people of education willingly gathered information for the authorities and the secret police, and thought they were doing so for “the good of the Revolution,” for the sake of the mysterious…
Category: Russia
Today’s One-Liner (#319)
Courage and victory come to us only when we resolve to make sacrifices. –Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, We Have Ceased To See the Purpose: Essential Speeches, 20
Today’s One-Liner (#318)
When the work of art invades our consciousness, something within us catches flame. –George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism, 45
Present Moment, Awesome Moment
Goethe once said that during eighty years of life he had known eleven happy days. I imagine that everyone, in the course of their life, must have seen many hundreds of sunrises and sunsets; they…
Today’s One-Liner (#310)
Everyone should read at one point in his life Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. –James Schall, S.J., A Student’s Guide to Liberal Learning, 34
Engagingly Readable
Dostoevsky is not a writer to struggle through or with, but one who tries to make his work as interesting and exciting—and as readable—as possible. His works raise some of the deepest moral and philosophic…
Today’s One-Liner (#303)
Every time you pray, if your prayer is sincere, there will be new feeling and new meaning in it, which will give you fresh courage, and you will understand that prayer is an education….
A Horse’s Soul Is…
Horses always seem utterly inscrutable. Even when they laugh or weep, they look quite imperturbable. All the horse’s powers of expression have gone into its parts: these are never still for a minute, twitching, twirling…
Today’s One-Liner (#302)
A novel is a trap, a maze into which we are drawn by the plot until we are swallowed up by the narrative, becoming its prisoner and confidante. –Abram Tertz, A Voice from the Chorus,…
Warning
Some thinkers have sadly concluded that the enchantment Nadezhda Mandelstam recognized in the word revolution, “to which whole nations have succumbed,” continues to bewitch intellectuals. In his argument with dissident scientist Andrei Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn accused…