Posts Tagged ‘Dostoevsky’
Give Change A Chance: How To Grow From Life’s Challenges
Time For Change When I was in the theater world, we used to perform this improv game where, in the middle of a scene, the director would shout from the side of the stage: “Make a new choice!” If I’d been a lumberjack chopping down a tree, now I was a terrorist felling a television…
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 MoreDostoyevsky on the Importance of Community. How to Create It in the Classroom
Creating community in the classroom has been crucial this past year, particularly at the university level. We should be thankful for all the ways that we’ve been able to remain in contact over the last 18 months, even if they aren’t ideal. From Zoom calls to masking to social distancing, we’ve done our best to…
Read MoreDostoyevsky’s Honeymoon to Forget Is Fascinating. Read On…
Honeymoon Drama – Dostoyevsky and Anna Every vacation has its highs and lows, even a honeymoon. But you’d be hard-pressed to find a honeymoon with more drama than the trip taken by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and his new wife, Anna, soon after their marriage in 1867. What was meant to be a three-month getaway abroad for…
Read MoreTo Teach is To Love: Dostoevsky’s Message to Educators in Our Troubled Times
Alyosha, the youngest of the Karamazov brothers, has just lived through the heartrending tragedy of his father’s brutal murder followed by his brother Dmitry’s wrongful conviction of the crime. His heart now reeling a few days after the grueling trial, Alyosha, twenty-three, goes to the funeral of the schoolboy, Ilyusha Snegiryov, and there meets a…
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 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 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…
Read More