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Articles
Dostoevsky’s Credo
What does it mean to believe something? Is it possible for a person to profess an idea sincerely, yet discover that he never really believed it? If a man’s...
Faith and Russian Literature
Russians take positions to the extreme. As a result, Russian intellectual history shows us where ideas may lead—and in Russia’s case, really did. The English prided themselves on moderation...
What Pilate Learns
No doctrine was more fundamental to the Bolsheviks than atheism. They professed absolute certainty that nothing exists beyond the chain of cause and effect described by the sciences. From...
Hall of Mirrors
Never Speak to Strangers:And Other Writing from Russia and the Soviet Unionby david satteribidem, 692 pages, $34 In this unexpectedly timely collection of essays, the journalist David Satter recalls...
The Cancellation of Russian Culture
In the medieval era, when a thinker successfully claimed divine revelation, he placed his words beyond dispute. Only the hopelessly benighted or demonically inspired could doubt him. In recent...
Tolstoy’s Wisdom and Folly
In his speech “The Strenuous Life,” Theodore Roosevelt identified “the American character” with “the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife.” “The man who does not shrink...
The Greatest Christian Novel
When Dostoevsky wrote his last and greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov, the revolutionary movement that would lead to Bolshevism was well underway. The terrorist organization People’s Will—one of the...
Poet of Loneliness
Fifty-Two Stories by anton chekhov translated by richard pevear and larissa volokhonsky knopf, 528 pages, $35 No writer understood loneliness better than Chekhov. People long for understanding, and try...
A Courageous College President
I suppose it had to happen sooner or later: The sort of conflicts that have occurred at other colleges and universities at last came to Northwestern. The difference is...
Suicide of the Liberals
Between 1900 and 1917, waves of unprecedented terror struck Russia. Several parties professing incompatible ideologies competed (and cooperated) in causing havoc. Between 1905 and 1907, nearly 4,500 government officials...
The New Lazarus
The Aviatorby eugene vodolazkintranslated by lisa c. haydenoneworld, 400 pages, $26.99 In one of the greatest memoirs of the Stalin years, Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote, “We have to get over...
The Dark Russian
Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs by douglas smith farrar, straus and giroux, 848 pages, $35 The Okhrana, the czar’s secret police, gave him the code...
