The Way It Looked in 1908
What you are doing, you do not for the people but for yourselves, to retain the position you occupy, a position you consider advantageous but which is really a most pitiful and abominable one. So …
Category: Russia
Like Being in Warsaw in 1941
Merely to know that somewhere, far away, there are men who torture other men by inflicting all sorts of humiliations and inhuman degradations and sufferings on them; and for three months constantly to look on…
Circle of Influence
Men need but understand this: they need but stop troubling themselves about external and general matters, in which they are not free, and use but one hundredth part of the energy, which they employ on…
Two Alyoshas
Dostoevsky’s—There was something in him that told one, that convinced one (and it was so all his life afterwards) that he did not want to be a judge of men, that he would not take…
He Made an Impression
“God grant us more such Russian rogues,” Marya Dmitrievna suddenly mixed in vexedly. “He lived a week with us; we saw nothing but good from him,” she said. “Courteous, wise, just.” –Leo Tolstoy, Hadji…
The Miracle of Being Awake
Suddenly some force shoved him in the chest, in the side, choked his breath still more, he fell through the hole, and there, at the end of the hole, something lit up. What was done…
Blinded
I did not know the light and I thought there was no truth in life. But having become convinced that people could only live by this light, I began to seek its source and I…
Reckoning with Ourselves
I recently finished a course with my friends Dianne Lee and Martín Antonio Zaldívar-Barragán, “Reckoning with Russia, War, and Ourselves.” We read and discussed Tolstoy, Kuznetsov, Alexievich, and Politkovskaya. I invite you to check out…
Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky’s art is literally prophetic. He is not prophetic in the sense of predicting the future, but in a truly biblical sense, for he untiringly denounces the fall of the people of God back into…
An Odious Comparison?
Norman Mailer once related a story he came across: Somewhere around the turn of the century, Chekhov visits Tolstoy. He takes the train to the nearest station. Let’s say it’s wintertime. He rents two horses…