Sublime

Gary Shteyngart’s The Russian Debutante’s Handbook

Dostoevsky’s achievement is that he is able to put words of hate into the mouths of basically hateful people without destroying the reader’s sympathy for them.

what kind of Russia is this that compels a person to work a job to which she has no calling, and be so reduced by it? To have to collect funds and teach in a drafty room and get no support from the community? How could anyone love that life? (I find myself thinking of Terry Eagleton’s assertion that “capitalism plunders the sensuality of the body.”