Category: Essays, Letters & Speeches
It is not to be denied that Russian thought is chiefly manifested in the great Russian novelists. Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, and Tchekhov made explicit in their works conceptions of the world which yield nothing in definiteness to the philosophic schemes of the great dogmatists of o...
Acknowledgment and respect for the prescribed order had become so deeply rooted in the German soul--I speak of Germany, because no other nation upon earth is so highly disciplin...
1. Part 1It is not to be denied that Russian thought is chiefly manifested in the great Russian novelists. Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, and Tchekhov made explicit in their works conceptions of t...
2. Part 2The hero of _The Tedious Story_ is an old professor; the hero of _Ivanov_ a young landlord. But the theme of both works is the same. The professor had overstrained himself, and...
7. Part 7Socrates lived seventy years. He was once a youth, once a man, once a greybeard. But what if he had lived a hundred and forty years, experienced once again all the three seasons...
11. Part 11The Greeks had no knowledge of the printing-press, and no literary reviews. They usually took their wisdom out into the market-place, and applied all their efforts to persuade p...
6. Part 6Again, I would draw attention to the far from accidental circumstances that his preaching coincided with the 'serenest' period of his life. He who had in time past been a homele...
10. Part 10Long ago Dostoevsky pointed out that the instinct of destruction is as natural to the human soul as that of creation. Beside these two instincts all our faculties appear to be m...
3. Part 3The content of _The Tedious Story_ thus reduces to the fact that the professor, expressing his 'new' thoughts, in essence declares that he finds it impossible to acknowledge the...
12. Part 12When _cogito ergo sum_ came into Descartes' head, he marked the day--November 10, 1619--as a remarkable day: 'The light of a wonderful discovery,' he wrote in his diary, 'flashe...
13. Part 13And it must be sought by methods quite different from those by which it has been sought hitherto. To some extent Kant attempted to describe how he represented to himself the mea...
5. Part 5'... Let us talk.... Let us talk of my beautiful life.... What shall I begin with? [Musing a little.] ... There are such things as fixed ideas, when a person thinks day and nigh...
4. Part 4Indeed, the construction of this story leaves no doubt in the mind. Tchekhov wished to compromise, and he compromised. He had come to feel how intolerable was hopelessness, how...
8. Part 8This conclusion is highly consoling as well for the sage as for the profane. For every sage, even the most exalted, is at the same time one of the profane--if we discard the aca...