miniZibaldone

In the House of Creativity I had got to know the kind, sweet smile of Katya, the thin little cook; I knew how she blushed if someone praised the soup she had made. Katya told me that she had come to Armenia from Zaporozhye and that her husband was a Molokan. Embarrassed, she told me how strange she found it that Molokans drink tea at weddings and don’t touch wine and how very strange the Leapers and Jumpers are. She informed me in a dignified tone that “Our own Tsakhkadzor Molokans don’t leap and jump.” Katya is gentle and kind. Her voice, her movements, her gait are all timid and indecisive. Everything embarrasses her. Her little son, Alyosha, who is in his first year at school, comes in—and Katya blushes and looks down at the floor. And Alyosha blushes too, murmuring something barely audible in reply to my simple “What year are you in at school?” He even looks like his mother. He is pale and has light-blue eyes; he is covered in freckles and his eyebrows and eyelashes are the colo...

H:eS1f, H:cS1f, H:CS2b, H:fS3b, H:fS3f Men and Saints Charles Peguy  An Armenian Sketchbook by Vasily Grossman gratis Robert Chandler The Road by Vasily Grossman   Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman   Everything Flows by Vasily Grossman Temporal and Eternal  by Charles Peguy The Portal of the Mystery of Hope by Charles Peguy

An Armenian Sketchbook   by Vasily Grossman Introduction An Armenian Sketchbook , written in early 1962, two years before Vasily Grossman’s death in September 1964, is unlike anything else Grossman wrote. It is deeply personal and has an air of spontaneity; Grossman seems simply to be chatting to the reader about his immediate impressions of Armenia—its people, its mountains, its ancient churches—and digressing, almost at random, onto subjects that range from the problem of nationalism to his views on art and even his difficulties with his bladder and bowels. The underlying cause of these physical problems was that Grossman was in the early stages of cancer, soon to be diagnosed in one of his kidneys. Just as   Everything Flows , which he began in the mid-1950s but continued to expand and revise during his last years, is Grossman’s political testament, so   An Armenian Sketchbook   is his personal testament, a discussion of the values he holds deare...