Word: tolstoys
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...many things," the Greek poet Archilochus wrote in one of his fragments. "The hedgehog knows one big thing." Sir Isaiah Berlin the political philosopher, used that enigmatic formula as the framework for one of the most luminous essays of the century, The Hedgehog and the Fox, a study of Tolstoy first published in 1951. Berlin divided the world's writers and thinkers into two categories. The hedgehogs (men like Dante, Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche) are monists-they organize their universe into a central vision, one comprehensive principle The foxes (Shakespeare, Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Moli...
...Hedgehog and the Fox is one of eleven articles and lectures collected in Russian Thinkers, the first of four projected volumes of his selected writings. Although the subjects (Tolstoy, Turgenev, Bakunin, Belinsky, Herzen) were creatures of the 19th century, Berlin's acute intellect addresses one of the most difficult questions of the 20th: Are men so hungry for deterministic Utopias, for the comfort of all-encompassing systems, that they reject the insecurities of the fox's diverse world for the awful predictability of totalitarian structures...
...extraordinary a child prodigy that the Psychological Laboratory in Amsterdam began a four-year study of him when he was seven. It found that his precocity was similar to that of the child Mozart. At eight, he read all of Shakespeare in German translation; at ten came Dostoevsky and Tolstoy...
...People can't understand that you can study filmmakers like Welles, John Ford, Renoir and Bergman the way you can study Tolstoy, Whitman and Shakespeare. Students have a difficult time accepting film as anything more than entertainment or communication. Imagine if a professor in the Music department had to spend a semester convincing students that there is a difference between popular music and music...
...hour series has an advantage - perhaps eight hours - over a movie. This Anna has the capaciousness and subtlety that the film versions, good as they were, necessarily lacked. Tolstoy had originally thought of calling his novel Two Marriages, and a major theme of the book is the contrast between the happily allied Kitty (Caroline Langrishe) and Levin (Robert Swann) and the ill-matched Karenins. The series is able to develop that subplot and prove, so far as Tolstoy was concerned anyway, the thesis of the novel's famous opening sentence: "All happy families are alike, but an unhappy family...