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.

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…

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…

Of Course, A Russian Would Say This

A book is a square chunk of hot, smoking conscience–and nothing else!–Boris Pasternak, quoted in Gary Saul Morson,  Wonder Confronts Certainty:  Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter