Gary Saul Morson – Pray for Chekhov: Or, What Russian Literature Can Teach Conservatives. VIDEO:
Some conservatives allready have learned from them.
Funny, but lately I have been in the mood to read the Russian classics. Maybe something is in the air — need for soul, spirituality.
Russian writers are superb.
Whatever boiled down to Ayn Rand was authentic. The rest was trying to figure out how to rationalize living off the labor of others.
…but the fact remained that this was a predatory state which the Czar and a small group of noblemen and bureaucrats ruled for their own exclusive benefit...The ruling group owned all the wealth, enjoyed all the privileges and monopolized all the political power, and it did not intend to give up any of its prerogatives. It considered the peasants to be little better than animals..."
I have become fond of Solzhenitsyn.
Also loved English and French literature, occasionally others.
Tolstoy had a theory that history wasn’t made by famous or powerful men, but that certain times and events drove certain men into prominence. When those circumstances changed, the men vanished into obscurity, or were consumed by the very events that inspired their fame.
Napoleon was one from Tolstoy’s period. Churchill came later but suffered much the same fate. And then there were the Jacobins and the other victims of the French Revolution ...
I'm not sure if the book, first published in Russian, is still in print, but it's available for free online.
Both Dostoyevski and Ayn Rand did more to explain leftism from conservative perspective than any Western author. And then comes Solzhenitsyn.
The People’s Cube (who are Ukes and Russians) are doing a better job than Western authors in that too.
What I'm talking about is the politically correct elimination of transliterated foreign text and replacement with text in the alphabet of the foreign language.
So, for example, you may not see words like gulag or samizdat. Instead you will see a group of indecipherable Cyrillic characters.
If you complain about it you will be told to shut up and learn Cyrillic you lazy, racist bastard.
I learned so much about Soviet atrocities and the failures of Communism by reading books with translated and transliterated words.
I'm sorry but I don't have the time or desire to learn Cyrillic. I know some Greek characters only because I had lots of math in college. But putting them together to form words takes more time and takes me out of the text.
So the PC crowd that pretends it wants to bring peoples together is actually turning us more into a disconnected Tower of Babel day by day.
Golden State Rose, don’t forget that 19 out 20 of Russian Golden Age authors were sentenced for wrongthink. Knowing this piece of history pokes a big hole to the arguments of those saying we should support the Czar Putin because of Tolstoy, who in fact was sentenced to death and not Tzarinista at all.