An Annunciation on the Battlefield
On December 2, 1805, the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte achieved his most spectacular victory at the Battle of Austerlitz against an allied army of Russians and Austrians.…
Between Two Millstones: Interview with Daniel J. Mahoney
The following is an interview with Daniel J. Mahoney, the Augustine Chair in Distinguished Scholarship at Assumption College, about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Between Two Millstones: Book 1: Sketches…
Solzhenitsyn’s Between Two Milestones: Sketches of Exile, 1974-1978
Between Two Milestones. Book I. Sketches of Exile, 1974-1978. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018. “Away from home in a country far…
Solzhenitsyn at One Hundred
“Live not by lies,” was the advice that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (born December 11, 1918) gave his compatriots when they asked him how to stand up to the…
The Problem of Theocracy in The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s final novel, The Brothers Karamazov, has rightly earned its place among the greatest books of all time. It warrants this stature in no small part because…
Ukraine and Russian Neo-Imperialism
Ukraine and Russian Neo-Imperialism: The Divergent Break. Ostap Kushnir. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018. Since the end of the Cold War, Ukraine has neither transition to…
Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party
Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party. A. James McAdams. Princeton University Press, 2017. James McAdams has provided a compendious but readable…
A Witness and Prophet for History: Solzhenitsyn’s March 1917
March 1917: The Red Wheel. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017. Historians like Eric Hobsbawn had argued that the Russian Revolution was…
1917: Darkness Falls
March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 1. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017. The Bolshevik coup d’état of October 25…
Crime and Punishment: A Timeless Psychological Masterpiece
Personally, I require a ceiling, although a high one. Yes, I like ceilings, and the high better than the low. In literature I think there are low-ceiling…
Giving the Devil His Due: Demonic Authority in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor and Fyodor Dostoevsky
Giving the Devil His Due: Demonic Authority in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Jessica Hooten Wilson. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2017. Giving the…
Walker Percy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the Search for Influence
Walker Percy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the Search for Influence. Jessica Hooten Wilson. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2017. When suffering from tuberculosis and confined to…
This Star Will Shine Forth from the East: Dostoevsky and the Politics of Humility
As Isaiah Berlin once noted, Fyodor Dostoevsky is perhaps the most “centripetal” of all Russian writers.1 This is to say that all of his thoughts and inquiries…
Dostoevsky’s Discovery of the Christian Foundation of Politics
The neglect of Fyodor Dostoevsky as a political theorist can be explained in part by his choice of imaginative literature rather than discursive argument as his primary…
The Apocalypse of Beatitude: Modern Gnosticism and Ancient Faith in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed
Prelude: Gnosticism Ancient and Modern Eric Voegelin’s use of the phrase “modern gnosticism” complicates the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns in that the phrase suggests…
