Not the Pat Answer
Father Zosima then advises his suppliant, in some of the words that Father Ambrose of Optina Pustyn asked Dostoevsky to convey to Anna Grigoryevna: “Be not comforted. Consolation is not what you need. Weep and…
Category: Russia
It’s Simple
He was not trying to convince me of anything. He spoke with sorrow about people’s reluctance to follow life’s most important law—that you should wish for others what you wish for yourself; that you should…
The Soul’s Secret
For a moment this sense of [Sofya Levinton’s] past blotted out everything present, blotted out the abyss. It was the very strangest of feelings, something you could never share with any other person—not even your…
Remember to Remember
The following is the conclusion to Leo Tolstoy’s short story “Three Questions”— Remember that there is only one important time and that is now. The present moment is the only time over which we have…
Be a Light
Then coming to this pass [Ryōkan] found only one way to go: he made up his mind, to go his own way, that is to say, to pursue the way of truth—the only way a…
Here and Now, This Is It
In another passage of the letter to his brother, he defines the ecstatic sense of life that he felt on being pardoned: “Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute could be a lifetime…
On “Useful Idiots”
The last half of 2023 I have shared several posts based on the riveting book by Gary Saul Morson, Wisdom Confronts Certainty. Recently, I noticed he and his colleague Morton Schapiro used their knowledge on…
Dostoevsky Saw It Coming
What would be “a thousand times more serious” is revolutionary killing such as Dostoevsky was to predict in The Possessed. This book, alone among nineteenth-century works, foresaw what we have come to call totalitarianism, not…
One Person Can Change Everything for Us
And if his life was important, if it differed from other lives, it was because even its smallest, seemingly mutest events took on meaning, and acquired a resonance of their own, from Ludmila’s presence in…
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…