Start Where We Are
Why exactly is sudden transformation according to a model impossible? The same question can be asked about individuals: why can’t someone just become what she admires? Disgusted with her life, Tolstoy’s Kitty, as we have…
Category: Russia
Today’s One-Liner (#16)
Sometimes I think that pain is a bridge between people, a secret connection; other times, it seems like an abyss. –Svetlana Alexeievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, translated by Bela Shayevich.
Today’s One-Liner (#15)
The only good life is one in which there is no need for miracles. –Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope against Hope: A Memoir
What’s Missing
During the thousand years of her history Russia had seen many great things. During the Soviet period the country had seen global military victories, vast construction sites, whole new cities, dams across the Dnieper and…
Why Read the Russians (And Why I Have Classes on Them)
Reading Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, my students experience literature as never before. No more symbol hunting, artful theorizing, or smug political judgment: the Russians address the questions that really matter in a way that teaches readers…
One Kind Gesture
I am grateful to Gary Saul Morson, for his book that has engaged me over the last year, Wisdom Confronts Certainty, as well as many of his articles and essays. Thanks to Morson’s insights here…
Moving toward Perfection
When Turgenev pleaded with him to return to the literary art that had first won him fame, he did not understand that for Tolstoy the measure of true greatness was not what we were but…
Specks and Seeds
Incidentally, I have already mentioned that although he lost his mother in his fourth year, he remembered her afterwards all his life, her face, her caresses, “as if she were standing alive before me.” Such…
From Fyodor Dostoevsky to Thich Nhat Hanh
“Compassion will give meaning and understanding to Rogozhin himself. Compassion is the chief and perhaps only law of being for all mankind.”—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot Please call me by my true name,so that I can…
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…