Russian literature might almost be described as the literature of conversion. (We noted some famous instances in Chapter 3.) Time and again, suffering leads to awareness of Truth or apprehension of God. Tolstoy’s autobiographical Confession recounts…
However little education a man may have, he cannot but know that Christ did not sanction murder, but taught kindness, meekness, forgiveness of injuries, love of one’s enemies—and therefore he cannot help seeing that on…
Why exactly is sudden transformation according to a model impossible? The same question can be asked about individuals: why can’t someone just become what she admires? Disgusted with her life, Tolstoy’s Kitty, as we have…
Reading Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, my students experience literature as never before. No more symbol hunting, artful theorizing, or smug political judgment: the Russians address the questions that really matter in a way that teaches readers…
When Turgenev pleaded with him to return to the literary art that had first won him fame, he did not understand that for Tolstoy the measure of true greatness was not what we were but…
“Therefore the task for me is not to change my own life, as I thought at first, but as far as I can to aid in improving the position of those unfortunates who have evoked…
We are not limited to our physical body, even when we are alive. We inter-are with our ancestors, our descendants, and the whole of the cosmos. We do not have a separate self; we are…
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…
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…
All the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insoluble… They can never be solved, but only outgrown. This “outgrowing” proved on further investigation to require a new level of consciousness. Some higher…