Top Highlights

• Their meaning for Russian culture will be set forth in the early pages of this book; they serve to suggest both the visionary and the earthy aspects of Russian culture.
• conflict. To be sure, Mendeleev’s chemistry, Lobachevsky’s mathematics, Pushkin’s poetry, Tolstoy’s novels, Kandinsky’s paintings, and Stravinsky’s music can all be appreciated with relatively little reference
• As a result of this feeling of common involvement and interdependence, the kind of debate that is usually conducted between individuals in the West often rages even more acutely within individuals in Russia. For many Russians “to think, feel, suffer, and understand are one and the same thing,”
• Three in particular—the natural surroundings, the Christian heritage, and the Western contacts of Russia—hover bigger than life over the pages that lie ahead. These forces seem capable of weaving their own strange web of crisis and creativity out of the efforts of men. Usually they are working at cross-purposes, though occasionally—as in some fleet...
• The first force is that of nature itself. It has been said that Russia’s thinkers are not formal philosophers but poets;