Algis Valiunas

In the popular understanding of Christmas, Charles Dickens’s 1843 novella looms large. A Christmas Carol seems to represent not only Christmassy warmth, fellowship, and cheer, but the very essence of Christian practice. At the end, Ebenezer Scrooge, the old skinflint, is redeemed by an . . . . Continue Reading »

“I wandered lonely as a cloud.” So begins a famous poem of William Wordsworth’s, one that was often taught to schoolchildren back when memorizing poetry was part of education. The poet comes upon “a crowd, / A host, of golden daffodils.” The flowers flutter and dance before him, their . . . . Continue Reading »

The Russian soul. The phrase serves as shorthand for Russia’s national character, after the manner of American innocence, French arrogance, Italian dolce far niente, and what used to be the English stiff upper lip. Russians are reputed to feel more than the rest of us do, think deep thoughts . . . . Continue Reading »

The Norwegian master Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) is and will remain the most important modern playwright—which is not to say there are no flaws in his work. Of all artists, playwrights are the most beholden to the moralism of their time; they must love and hate what their audiences love and . . . . Continue Reading »

The term poète maudit, or “cursed poet,” was coined by Paul Verlaine. His little book Les poètes maudits (1884) interleaved his own honorific prose with poems by some of the poets he most esteemed but whose very greatness assured that they were known only to the cognoscenti. It was their . . . . Continue Reading »

One cannot say with assurance that Russia has outdone all other modern nations in cruelty; the competition is just too stiff. Nevertheless, the memorabilia of inhumanity with a Russian face are indelible: the birch, the knout, the Cossack’s saber, the cattle car, the Arctic slave-labor camp, the . . . . Continue Reading »

The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and Les Misérables By Mario Vargas Llosa Princeton University Press, 208 pages, $24.95 The most potent philosophers and scientists of the nineteenth century—Schopenhauer, Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche—saw their main undertaking as dethroning the . . . . Continue Reading »

“And having food and raiment let us be therewith content . . . . For the love of money is the root of all evil.” St. Paul’s admonition to Timothy rings with the hard ascetic fervor that one has come to think of as distinctively Christian. Of course, certain of Paul’s successors . . . . Continue Reading »

The last American painters of colossal spiritual ambition were such artists as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Clyfford Still, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell—the Abstract Expressionists. It is chiefly the scale of this ambition that unites . . . . Continue Reading »

Voltaire in Exile by Ian Davidson Grove, 326 pp. $24 If a person of faith troubles to think of Voltaire (1694“1778) at all these days, it is most likely as the village atheist: shoveling scorn in Candide on Leibniz’s sunny theodicy that proclaims this the best of all possible worlds, . . . . Continue Reading »