Leo Tolstoy

February 14, 2020|communism, Leo Tolstoy, Soviet Union, Vasily Grossman, World War II

A 20th-Century Tolstoy?

Vasily Grossman with the Red Army in Schwerin, Germany, 1945 (Heritage Image Partnership/Alamy Stock Photo)

Grossman is especially concerned to recreate wartime experience in its entirety, from the separation of loved ones to heroism, cowardice, and death.

January 3, 2018|Leo Tolstoy, Rule of Law, Russian Revolution, Soviet Communism, Vasily Maklakov

The Doomed Cause of a Russian Liberal

by Kenneth D.M. Jensen|

Maklakov’s story is one of political moderation, coupled with an acute appreciation of the difficult concept of rule of law.

November 13, 2017|Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Leo Tolstoy, March 1917, Pyotr Stolypin, Russian Revolution, The Red Wheel, World War I

Solzhenitsyn’s Sweeping Tale of War and Revolution

by Will Morrisey|

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) wrote first for Russians, especially the young. “The recent history of our country is so little known, or taught in such a distorted fashion,” said he, that young Russians more than anyone needed resources to be able to think clearly about what their forebears experienced in the cataclysmic time of his birth. In The Red Wheel, Solzhenitsyn challenged that history with a series of eight novels divided into four groups or “knots.” The image of the red wheel first comes to sight as the giant wheel of a locomotive—big enough to lean on but spine-twisting if it moves. In the…

A Mirror of the 20th-Century Congress

by Joseph Postell

Wright undermined the very basis of his local popularity—the decentralized nature of the House—by supporting reforms that gave power to the party leaders.

The Graces of Flannery O'Connor

by Henry T. Edmondson III

O'Connor's correspondence is a goldmine of piercing insight and startling reflections on everything from literature to philosophy to raising peacocks.

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