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“... Chekhov had such a passion for problems, but only if solution might stay unrequited. The writer, Ivan Bunin, said that Chekhov loved to read out random oddities from the newspapers: ‘Babkin, a Samara merchant, left all his money for a memorial to Hegel!’ (Chebutykin, in Three Sisters, does the same, noting that ‘Balzac got married in Berdichev’.) The ...”

“... of children’s toys appeared glor-ifying the Boers and ridiculing John Bull. Even the pacifist Tolstoy was caught up in the wild enthusiasm for the war: ‘You know what point I’ve reached? Opening a paper every morning I passionately wish to read that the Boers have beaten the British.’ He knew that he ‘should not rejoice at the vict-ories of the ...”

“... the earth will weep for its old gods .... Well, then we shall bring forward ... whom? ... Ivan the Tsarevich. You! You!’ After a minute, Stavrogin understands: ‘A pretender? ... So that’s your plan at last!’ He himself is slated to be the pretender. ‘In this we have a force, and what a force! ... the whole gimcrack show will fall to the ...”

“... of classical Japanese, Grigory Chkartashvili, inspired – he avows – by Griboedov, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky; his hero combines traits of Chatsky, Pechorin, Andrei Bolkonski and Prince Myshkin, with a touch of James Bond for good measure. Coquetting in the manner of a latter-day Propp, he has set out to illustrate the 16 possible sub-genres of crime ...”

“... notices there isn’t a spot of ink anywhere. In Pushkin’s introduction to Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin, which is included in Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s new translation of Pushkin’s prose, a friend of the deceased (fictional) writer, a neighbouring squire, says that after his death Belkin’s housekeeper ‘sealed all of her ...”

“... Though he had the same qualms, Solzhenitsyn yielded to the temptation to emulate the later Tolstoy in acting the sage and returned to Moscow in 1994. He has a group of followers and admirers in the media, and most political figures find it advisable to genuflect to his greatness. He has addressed the Duma, warning of the decadence of the authorities ...”

“... meant to apply to human actions. Nietzsche can have the last word on what Zarathustra said, and Tolstoy the final interpretation of how Ivan Ilyich died, but Althusser can never be the final author of his crime – if only because, as Arendt puts it, ‘real stories, in distinction from those we invent, have no ...”

“... to Benjamin’s Passagenwerk and to a romance by … Giscard d’Estaing. Epigraphs strewn from Tolstoy to Monty Python by way of Bismarck and Bagehot, Foucault and Arendt, are less than value-added. Such pretensions aside, however, van Middelaar produced something rare in the literature on European integration: an attractively readable account of it. The ...”