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Tag Archives: Tolstoy

Rachmaninov Meets Tolstoy

13-Sep-20

http://taltybaptistchurch.org/wp-json/wp/v2/product_cat/65 I heard a story today about Rachmaninov meeting Tolstoy. The young composer, in his early 20s, and fresh off the success of his 2nd Piano Concerto, went to see the venerable old sage.  Rachmaninov played a bit for Tolstoy, who listened for a while and then asked the young man, “Tell me, young man… does […]

Hitchens, Stegner, Mortality, and Moderns.

28-Nov-12

buy Gabapentin online from usa Sickness very much getting the better of me in the days following Thanksgiving, I spent three days indoors and very nearly all the time in bed. Having a great number of books at my disposal, being in the family house, for whatever inscrutable reason I read Christopher Hitchens’ Mortality on Friday, and Wallace Stegner’s Crossing […]

Catholic Charities on the Dole.

30-Dec-11

Catholic Charities in Illinois has closed down all its foster-care operations rather than comply with new regulations allowing same-sex couples to adopt.  The bishops’ lawyers are out, contesting that they have a First Amendment right to freedom of religion, and hence do not have to abide by state regulations; which sounds mildly plausible, until you […]

More Tolstoy.

23-Mar-10

“The railroad is to travel what the whore is to love.  Just as comfortable, and just as horribly mechanical and fatally monotonous.” – Tolstoy, in a letter to Turgenev. !  This man’s capacity to shock and horrify me – while being ever-so-civilized – never seems to end.  Calling whores “monotonous”!

Tolstoy on Music.

19-Mar-10

“They played Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata,” he continued.  “Do you know the first presto?  You do?” he cried.  “Ugh!  Ugh!  It is a terrible thing, that sonata.  And especially that part.  And in general music is a dreadful thing.  What is it?  I don’t understand it.  What is music?  What does it do?  And why does […]

Tolstoy. Who Else?

17-Mar-10

“Go round the shops in any big town.  There are goods worth millions and you cannot estimate the human labor expended on them, and look whether in nine-tenths of these shops there is anything for the use of men.  All the luxuries of life are demanded and maintained by women. “Count all the factories.  An […]

The Last Station.

17-Mar-10

Tolstoy is a figure I have always kept at arm’s length; beyond reading Anna Karenina (easily the greatest novel ever written; really no other deserves to be put in the same paragraph with it; I hated it) and the most famous short stories, I have mostly avoided him.  That he was full of hatred and […]