Category: Russia

Today’s One-Liner (#301)

Tolstoy and other classic writers deemed it their duty to curse prison, but Solzhenitsyn, who served time in conditions ­those writers could not have begun to imagine, can “say without hesitation: ‘Bless you, prison, for…

A Personal Bible

Tolstoy wrote little in 1910 but considerable effort went into completing For Every Day, the compilation of quotations from great authors arranged so as to illustrate the development of his own philosophy of life, a…

Just Taking Care of the Kulaks

“All these words had their effect on me too. I was only a girl—and during meetings and special briefings, from films, books, articles, and radio broadcasts, from Stalin himself, I kept hearing one and the…

Today’s One-Liner (#291)

In the West, too, appeared The Gulag Archipelago, his monumental three-volume exposé of the Soviet slave-labor system which single-handedly destroyed what remained of Western illusions about the great Communist experiment. –Joseph Epstein, Life Sentences: Literary…

You Say You Want a Revolution?

My brother Evgeni Yakovlevich used to say that the decisive part in the subjugation of the intelligentsia was played not by terror and bribery (though, God knows, there was enough of both), but by the…

Memory Multitudes

During the night he went through his vast store of memories. He remembered the hundreds of people who had passed through his life. He remembered pupils and teachers, friends and enemies. He remembered books and…

The Blood-stained Face of History

Could this really be socialism—with the labor camps of Kolyma, with the horrors of collectivization, with the cannibalism and the millions of deaths during the famine? Yes, there were times when a very different understanding…

Just One Little Onion

“You see, Alyoshechka,” Grushenka turned to him, laughing nervously, “I’m boasting to Rakitka that I gave an onion, but I’m not boasting to you, I’ll tell you about it for a different reason. It’s just…