http://taltybaptistchurch.org/events/2022-05-30/ Let me start with the end of the first chapter of The Brothers Karamazov: Finally she fled the house and ran away from Fyodor Pavlovich with a destitute seminarian, leaving the three-year-old Mitya in his father’s hands. Fyodor Pavlovich immediately set up a regular harem in his house and gave himself to the most unbridled […]
Category Archives: Essays on Literature
The Allusions in the Brothers Karamazov.
28-Mar-10More Tolstoy.
23-Mar-10“The railroad is to travel what the whore is to love. Just as comfortable, and just as horribly mechanical and fatally monotonous.” – Tolstoy, in a letter to Turgenev. ! This man’s capacity to shock and horrify me – while being ever-so-civilized – never seems to end. Calling whores “monotonous”!
Tolstoy on Music.
19-Mar-10“They played Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata,” he continued. “Do you know the first presto? You do?” he cried. “Ugh! Ugh! It is a terrible thing, that sonata. And especially that part. And in general music is a dreadful thing. What is it? I don’t understand it. What is music? What does it do? And why does […]
Tolstoy. Who Else?
17-Mar-10“Go round the shops in any big town. There are goods worth millions and you cannot estimate the human labor expended on them, and look whether in nine-tenths of these shops there is anything for the use of men. All the luxuries of life are demanded and maintained by women. “Count all the factories. An […]
The Last Station.
17-Mar-10Tolstoy is a figure I have always kept at arm’s length; beyond reading Anna Karenina (easily the greatest novel ever written; really no other deserves to be put in the same paragraph with it; I hated it) and the most famous short stories, I have mostly avoided him. That he was full of hatred and […]
Jayber Crow, by Wendell Berry.
03-Mar-10Several years ago, when I took it in mind to write a book, I reasoned with myself thus: “Young writers go astray by trying to write ‘the Great American Novel.’ Don’t try. Write the best book you can about the county where you live.” That county happened to be Richmond County, or Staten Island, and […]
Dreams and Beasts.
01-Feb-10“Dreams and Beasts are two keys by which we are to find out the secrets of our own nature. All mystics use them. They are like comparative anatomy. They test objects; or we may say, that must be a good theory of the universe, that theory will bring a commanding claim to confidence, which explains […]
Pushkin’s Tales of Belkin.
22-Jan-10When the snow is heaped up high all around your doorway – when the stars twinkle devilishly in the frigid air – when your friends are far away, and the peacefulness of a winter’s evening is all your own – what better pleasure is there than to lay back in an old recliner, face your […]
The Stranger By Albert Camus.
04-Jan-10The Stranger is one of the most enigmatic books on the modern classics bookshelf. While reading it, it is easy to believe that it is the result of a thought in the artist’s head; its strangeness resembles the strangeness of a thought taken very far. But it is not entirely clear what that thought is, […]
Simone de Beauvoir.
27-Apr-10Aurogra online cheap Apparently a new edition of her book The Second Sex is out (rather substance-free review from Salon here). I found the book in a friend’s house a few weeks ago, and devoured a few hundred pages of it before my visit ended. It’s dazzlingly intelligent and endlessly fascinating; I read it as perhaps it is […]