It’s Simple
He was not trying to convince me of anything. He spoke with sorrow about people’s reluctance to follow life’s most important law—that you should wish for others what you wish for yourself; that you should…
Tag: Vasily Grossman
The Soul’s Secret
For a moment this sense of [Sofya Levinton’s] past blotted out everything present, blotted out the abyss. It was the very strangest of feelings, something you could never share with any other person—not even your…
One Person Can Change Everything for Us
And if his life was important, if it differed from other lives, it was because even its smallest, seemingly mutest events took on meaning, and acquired a resonance of their own, from Ludmila’s presence in…
What Makes for an Impressive Person
Meetings with famous people can—as we have seen—be disappointing. Someone very gifted, even a true genius, can turn out to be a very ordinary person indeed. His talent is separate from his soul. And you…
Tolstoy/Grossman
[Russian] writers have decried Russia’s slavery and violent past.—Alexandra Popoff, Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century Reading [Leo] Tolstoy strengthened [Vasily] Grossman’s ambition to become a writer. Tolstoy’s interest in the human soul, his quest…
Mother and Son
There was one other constant in Viktor’s life, a quiet light that illuminated his whole inner world. It was his mother who had given him this light, but he did not realize this. She felt…
Why Read Dostoevsky
It was never my goal to put together a collection of horror stories, to overwhelm the reader. I was collecting the human. Dostoevsky asked the question: “How much of the human is there in a…
Senseless Kindness
Yes, as well as this terrible Good with a capital ‘G’, there is every day human kindness. The kindness of an old woman carrying a piece of bread to a prisoner, the kindness of a…
Cheer Up: Reminders
Furnace. The first evening, about 5 o’clock, the pain from the extreme heat, exhaustion, and headaches make me completely lose control of my movements. I can’t lower the furnace damper. A coppersmith jumps up and…
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…