Life
The Graduation Speech You Need to Hear: A Message of Hope and Inspiration
If I were giving this year’s commencement speech, here’s what I would say: Dear graduating class of 2023, You live in a perilous world. You know that as well as anybody. Your generation has lived through COVID, a broken political culture, the terror of gun violence, and the specter of nuclear war once again rearing its ugly…
Read MoreMost “Great” Russian Writers Were Men. Here’s How We Need To Change That Today
Russian Writers In History I’ll never forget the uncomfortable conversation I had years ago with my good friend, writer, and philosopher Marietta McCarty. She was sharing with me her struggles to get men in her field to take seriously the notion that women could be philosophers, too. Surely I was more enlightened than that? she…
Read MoreThe Humane Russia I Love, The Brutal Russia I Hate
As someone who’s dedicated much of my professional life to studying Russian literature and culture, I’m following the tragic war in Ukraine with great interest and sadness. It is teaching me lessons both personal and political: how dictatorships work, how bullies maintain their grip on power, how leaders’ deep inferiority complexes often masquerade as superiority…
Read MoreHow Loss And Struggle Can Lead To New Insights
Loss and Struggle At the beginning of December, I finally got the total hip replacement I’d been avoiding. All that was left of my right hip for the past few years was a pile of jagged spurs and dead bone rubbing excruciatingly against one another like a constant, throbbing toothache in my leg that a…
Read MoreThis is How Gratitude in a Broken World Looks
Tragedy Strikes A few weeks ago, on Monday, November 14, I woke up to the news that three students at the University of Virginia, where I teach–Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis Jr., and D’Sean Perry–had been murdered and two others wounded the night before by another UVa student who opened fire inside a charter bus…
Read MoreHow a Different Kind of Classroom Can Save Our Democracy
We’re about a month into the new school year, and already the grind has set in. In our family, that grind takes on a special significance this year as my ten-year-old son started fifth grade in a different school, with a new set of routines and expectations (did someone say homework?) amid a sea of…
Read MoreHow to Have Radical Hope in Troubled Times
Hope In The Sadness A few weeks ago it was a beautiful Monday in Northern Virginia, where I celebrated the Fourth of July with my family. I felt good about life and at peace with the world, a rarity for me these days. Late in the afternoon, a headline popped up on my phone…
Read MoreWhy Most Russians Still Love Putin
I’m often asked how Russian literature of the past can help illuminate Russian politics today. I recently wrote an article on this very subject and received a number of follow-up questions. One of the most interesting of them was: Why is Putin still so popular in Russia despite the world’s response to his war and…
Read MoreWhy I Choose Love
A few months ago, I watched my 9-year-old son conquer his fears and climb to the top of an indoor rock wall, a big accomplishment for him. As I lingered over the photos a day later, I thought of the parents of those children massacred in Uvalde who will never again get to watch their…
Read MoreHow The People of Ukraine Are Living Out The Deepest Lessons of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky
Pierre Bezukhov at the Battle of Borodino in War and Peace Ukraine And Russia Whenever I mention that I teach Russian literature these days, I get a weird look of surprise, confusion, or even disgust. I’m not alone. A few weeks ago a German university canceled a class on Dostoyevsky in order to make a…
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