Books
5 Dostoyevsky Works You Want To Learn More About
In my latest book, The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky, I tell the story of Dostoyevsky’s second wife, Anna, who was indispensable in helping the great author overcome a long list of personal, business, and literary struggles. It was with her help that he was able…
Read More6 Short, Accessible Books to Get You Started in Russian Literature
An Introduction to Russian Literature People who haven’t read much Russian literature probably have at least one preconceived notion of the genre — that they can expect a long book. And that’s understandable, considering that the works most often referenced as masterpieces in the field are indeed intimidatingly long. Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Tolstoy’s…
Read MoreHow Did Anna Dostoyevsky Become A Brave Russian Publishing Pioneer?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky is one of the giants of world literature, a writer whose work is still widely read, enjoyed, and debated, more than 140 years after his death. But even he admitted that he wasn’t much of a businessman—and he lived much of his adult life as if trying to prove the point. Thankfully, he…
Read MoreResources for Creating Equality in the Classrooms and the World
As a teacher dedicated to educational equity, I’ve become painfully aware how much I still have to learn about racism in our country, and how I must actively work to prevent racism from ever rearing its ugly head in my classroom. One of my most important discoveries is that even the most well-meaning teachers can…
Read MoreHow I Found My Voice and Myself in War and Peace
At a book talk I gave a few years ago, a teenage boy in the audience, intrigued by the stories I’d been telling about young characters’ tortuous journeys in War and Peace, asked me a question during the Q&A. “Did Tolstoy, like, really experience all that?” The ingenuous question got me thinking, not only about…
Read MoreThis is How Homemade Wisdom for Troubled Times Can Help Us Now
I can’t catch my breath or hear myself think, what with political divisiveness having reached Dostoyevskian proportions, my head spinning from the nonstop barrage of news—most of it bad, all of it “breaking”—and the general anxiety in the air. And yet, recently, out of this maelstrom there has emerged a miraculous little book by philosopher…
Read MoreTen Russian Novels You Need To Read To Be a Better Human
As President Trump and Vladimir Put get chummy amid political turmoil at home, serious accusations of Russian interference in the 2016 election, and a general sense of social malaise in both countries, Americans and Russians alike have a lot to think about these days. Both nations would do well to get beyond their ideological differences…
Read MoreWhy Now Is The Time To Give War and Peace a Chance
Summer, for many of us, offers a few of those long, unbroken stretches of time that, unlike the rest of our hurried, fragmented lives, positively cry out for a great big, abiding read. So perhaps this is the moment finally to tackle War and Peace. Widely acknowledged as the greatest novel ever written, War…
Read MoreChanging How Juvenile Offenders See Themselves—One Book at a Time
Duane is an eloquent 19-year-old who enjoys discussing world history and Russian literature. He has taught himself to count in multiple foreign languages and hopes to be an ambassador someday. This is not your typical teen — or youth inmate. He immersed himself in liberal arts while serving a sentence at Beaumont Juvenile Correctional…
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