Some thinkers have sadly concluded that the enchantment Nadezhda Mandelstam recognized in the word revolution, “to which whole nations have succumbed,” continues to bewitch intellectuals. In his argument with dissident scientist Andrei Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn accused…
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…
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…
This is that conquest of the world and of ourselves, which has been always considered as the perfection of human nature; and this is only to be obtained by fervent prayer, steady resolution, and frequent…
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…
As Kerouac aged, he reclaimed the Catholic identity he had inherited from his devout parents, although to the reader, the influence was often muffled under the Benzedrine and booze-fueled bacchanalia of his youth, especially when…
And I looked and saw a whirling banner which ran so fast that it seemed as if it could never make a stand, and behind it came so long a train of people that I…
Dostoevsky was concerned lest his depiction be considered blasphemous, and he thus includes in his postscript “one small nota bene: please don’t imagine that I would allow myself, in a work of mine, even the…
Grushenka recounts a Russian folktale about a wicked woman who dies and is condemned to the burning lake. Pitying her, her guardian angel recalls that the woman did one good deed in her life: she…
Wicked as I am, I want to pray! –Grushenka, in Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 8:8