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…

Blake and Dostoevsky

“The Divine Image” To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and LoveAll pray in their distress;And to these virtues of delightReturn their thankfulness. For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and LoveIs God, our father dear,And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and LoveIs…

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…

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…

Advice from the Sages

I am sorry that I cannot say anything more comforting, for active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams thirsts for immediate action, quickly performed, and with…

The Path of the Prosaic

for Natalie Long Faith comes not from theory but from experience, from the bottom up, by living the right sort of life from moment to moment. For Zossima, that means attending to the prosaic. One…

Lies

And therefore I think the solution I have found for myself will be valid for all sincere men who set themselves the same question. First of all, to the question: What must we do? I…