“Life is given to man only once, and one must live it so as not to be painfully ashamed of the years spent meaninglessly…” Chapter 1: The Departure […]
Russian literature
Blue Notebook No. 10
“There was a redheaded man who had no eyes or ears. He had no hair either, so he was called a redhead only in a manner of speaking.” […]
Russian literature
The Old Woman
“And so I sit, an old woman, in my room, and outside the window, the world goes on without me.” Chapter 1: The Old Woman’s Routine The story […]
Russian literature
The Gentleman from San Francisco
“The body was carried to Naples in the hold of the same steamer that had brought him to Capri, and there, in a cheap coffin, it was placed […]
Russian literature
Gooseberries
“A man needs not six feet of land, not a farm, but the whole globe, all of Nature, where unhindered he can display all the capacities and peculiarities […]
Russian literature
The Bet
“It’s better to live somehow than not to live at all.” The story begins at a dinner party where a heated debate arises between a banker and a […]
Russian literature
The Lady with the Dog
“If you are afraid of loneliness, don’t marry.” — Anton Chekhov, The Lady with the Dog Part I: Yalta Dmitri Gurov, a married Moscow banker in his late […]
Russian literature
Notes from Underground
“I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.” Part 1: Underground The unnamed narrator, a […]
Russian literature
The Idiot
“Beauty will save the world.” Part 1 Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, a young man with epilepsy and childlike innocence, returns to Russia after years in a Swiss sanatorium. […]
French literature
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
“What if God were not the one we imagined?” Chapter 1: The Birth of Jesus The novel opens with the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, but Schmitt reimagines […]