What Shall We Do Why Do Men Stupify Themselves

Leo Tolstoy became very interested in love and relationships. He saw the world around him, much like it is now, as the world is, filled with emptiness (if you pardon the ironic phrase). And yet he felt within him a draw and yearning, and, yes, an inner knowledge that there is more, and that there are answers to our questions. "Let us be diligent," that inner light says, as if together within ourselves, we have all we need, or ever would need to find the way forward. This is a paraphrase in my own words of the attitude of these later works by Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist -- and great thinker -- regardless of region. The volume includes two works, the first 100,000 words of which is the treatise, What Shall We Do, perhaps a more accessible work to be acquainted with Tolstoy's soul-searching and concerns of systematic contemporary life. The second work is a shorter yet worthy essay, providing insights as the title suggests. This edition has been lovingly and carefully edited by Alan Lewis Silva.

Books about thinkers require a kind of unity that their thought may not possess. This cautionary statement is especially applicable to Mikhail Bakhtin, whose intellectual development displays a diversity of insights that cannot be easily integrated or accurately described in terms of a single overriding concern. Indeed, in a career spanning some sixty years, he experienced both dramatic and gradual changes in his thinking, returned to abandoned insights that he then developed in unexpected ways, and worked through new ideas only loosely related to his earlier concerns Small wonder, then, that Bakhtin should have speculated on the relations among received notions of biography, unity, innovation, and the creative process. Unity--with respect not only to individuals but also to art, culture, and the world generally--is usually understood as conformity to an underlying structure or an overarching scheme. Bakhtin believed that this idea of unity contradicts the possibility of true creativity. For if everything conforms to a preexisting pattern, then genuine development is reduced to mere discovery, to a mere uncovering of something that, in a strong sense, is already there. And yet Bakhtin accepted that some concept of unity was essential. Without it, the world ceases to make sense and creativity again disappears, this time replaced by the purely aleatory. There would again be no possibility of anything meaningfully new. The grim truth of these two extremes was expressed well by Borges: an inescapable labyrinth could consist of an infinite number of turns or of no turns at all. Bakhtin attempted to rethink the concept of unity in order to allow for the possibility of genuine creativity. The goal, in his words, was a "nonmonologic unity," in which real change (or "surprisingness") is an essential component of the creative process. As it happens, such change was characteristic of Bakhtin's own thought, which seems to have developed by continually diverging from his initial intentions. Although it would not necessarily follow that the development of Bakhtin's thought corresponded to his ideas about unity and creativity, we believe that in this case his ideas on nonmonologic unity are useful in understanding his own thought--as well as that of other thinkers whose careers are comparably varied and productive.

What is the explanation of the fact that people use things that stupefy them: vódka, wine, beer, hashish, opium, tobacco, and other things. Why did the practice begin? Why has it spread so rapidly, and why is it still spreading among all sorts of people, savage and civilized? How is it that where there is no vódka, wine or beer, we find opium, hashish, and the like, and that tobacco is used everywhere? Why do people wish to stupefy themselves? Ask anyone why he began drinking wine and why he now drinks it. He will reply, “Oh, I like it, and everybody drinks,” and he may add, “it cheers me up.” Some — those who have never once taken the trouble to consider whether they do well or ill to drink wine — may add that wine is good for the health and adds to one's strength; that is to say, will make a statement long since proved baseless. Ask a smoker why he began to use tobacco and why he now smokes, and he also will reply: “To while away the time; everybody smokes.”

The dangers of political violence and the possibilities of non-violence were the central themes of three lives which changed the twentieth century—Leo Tolstoy, writer and aristocrat who turned against his class, Mohandas Gandhi who corresponded with Tolstoy and considered him the most important person of the time, and Nelson Mandela, prisoner and statesman, who read War and Peace on Robben Island and who, despite having led a campaign of sabotage, saw himself as a successor to Gandhi. Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela tried to create transformed societies to replace the dying forms of colony and empire. They found the inequalities of Russia, India, and South Africa intolerable yet they questioned the wisdom of seizing the power of the state, creating new kinds of political organisation and imagination to replace the old promises of revolution. Their views, along with their ways of leading others, are closely connected, from their insistence on working with their own hands and reforming their individual selves to their acceptance of death. On three continents, in a century of mass mobilization and conflict, they promoted strains of nationalism devoid of antagonism, prepared to take part in a general peace. Looking at Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela in sequence, taking into account their letters and conversations as well as the institutions they created or subverted, placing at the centre their treatment of the primal fantasy of political violence, this volume reveals a vital radical tradition which stands outside the conventional categories of twentieth-century history and politics.

This collection of inspirational quotes represents Tolstoy's lifelong quest to find meaning and understand life's purpose. Gathered from various writings throughout his lifetime, Tolstoy covers multiple topics, including self-improvement, marriage, good and evil, war, and civil disobedience.

The first critical, annotated edition of M. K. Gandhi's most famous written work, published seventy years after his death In the mid-1920s, prompted by a "small, still voice" that encouraged him to lay bare what was known only to him and his God, M. K. Gandhi began writing and publishing his autobiography. Drafted during a period of intensive fasting and "in-dwelling" at his ashram in Ahmedebad, his story of the soul portrayed the deeper, more inward experiences that made him externally an innovator in the struggles against violence, racism, and colonialism. The book, written in Gujarati and translated into English by Mahadev Desai, would become an international classic, hailed as one of the "100 Best Spiritual Books of the 20th Century." This first critical edition of this seminal work by leading Gandhi scholar Tridip Suhrud offers an unprecedented window into the original Gujarati text. Including both alternative English translations and illuminating notes, as well as a deeply researched introduction, it will bring renewed critical attention to one of the world's most widely read books.

Gary Saul Morson brings to life the intense intellectual debates shaping two centuries of Russian writing. Dialogues of great writers with philosophical wanderers and blood-soaked radicals reveal a contest between unyielding dogmatism and open-minded wonder, rendering the Russian literary canon at once distinctive and universally human.

[This is the full commentary on Isaiah 1-66.] For hundreds of years John Calvin's Commentaries have been admired and relied upon for their deep insights into Scripture. Charles Spurgeon told his students, "It would not be possible for me too earnestly to press upon you the importance of reading the expositions of that prince among men, John Calvin! Of all commentators I believe John Calvin to be the most candid. He was no trimmer and pruner of texts. He gave their meaning as far as he knew it. His honest intention was to translate the Hebrew and the Greek originals as accurately as he possibly could, and then to give the meaning which would naturally be conveyed by such Greek and Hebrew words: he laboured, in fact, to declare, not his own mind upon the Spirit's words, but the mind of the Spirit as couched in those words." And even Arminius himself admitted, "Next to the perusal of the Scriptures, which I earnestly inculcate, I exhort my pupils to peruse Calvin's commentaries, for I affirm that he excels beyond comparison in the interpretation of Scripture, and that his commentaries ought to be more highly valued than all that is handed down to us by the Library of the Fathers; so that I acknowledge him to have possessed above most others, or rather above all other men, what may be called an eminent gift of prophecy."