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If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time
guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told
that in forty years interrogation by torture would be [routinely] practiced
in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron
rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they
would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod
heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (“the secret
brand”); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of
a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible of circumstances,
prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by
thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays
would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to
an insane asylum.
—Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 17 May 1999, on page 21 Copyright © 2013 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/dostoevsky-morson-2-2865
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Deciphering a cigarette with Joseph Frank A look at the legacy of literary scholar and Dostoevsky biographer Joseph Frank (1918–2013). by Donald Kagan Upon his retirement from Yale, Donald Kagan considers the future of liberal education in this farewell speech. If you see something, say nothing Changes to the AP stylebook show that we’re blinding ourselves to the connections between Islamic extremism and terrorism.
Webcasts
Andrew C. McCarthy talks Islam
Poet George Green reads from his award-winning Lord Byron's Foot
Celebration of the Life of Robert H. Bork, 1927–2012 Weblog 
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