Category: World Literature

Experience and Expectation

Let me also recall Samuel Johnson, whose famous biography by his devotee Boswell is, I think, something along with the Bible that you should read a bit every day, if only for the delight of…

Riveting

It’s good for me to be the citizen of a state in which there are eight and a half million prime ministers, eight and a half million prophets, and eight and a half million messiahs….

Chaos of the Now

Yet of Plutarch, the Ancilla to Classical Reading says, “He has indubitably had more European readers than any other pagan Greek and has been the greatest single channel communicating to Europe a general sense of…

Engagingly Readable

Dostoevsky is not a writer to struggle through or with, but one who tries to make his work as interesting and exciting—and as readable—as possible. His works raise some of the deepest moral and philosophic…

Today’s One-Liner (#303)

Every time you pray, if your prayer is sincere, there will be new feeling and new meaning in it,   which will give you fresh courage, and you will understand that prayer is an education….

Today’s One-Liner (#302)

A novel is a trap, a maze into which we are drawn by the plot until we are swallowed up by the narrative, becoming  its prisoner and confidante.  –Abram Tertz,  A Voice from the Chorus,…

Warning

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…

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…