Labor Day Bites: Tolstoy Street/Dostoevsky Ave., Blago’s memoirs, Agriculture Reader gets cheap, organic farms in Greenpoint, and more.

We’ve been doing our best to talk about how much New Yorkers read on the subway, and we used the title “24 Anna Karenina readers can’t be wrong” to highlight the New York Times coverage of citizens of Gotham and their literary choices while commuting.  The Millions also took the Russian lit. route, but instead of Tolstoy Street, they went down Dostoevsky Ave. Is ex-Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich the next great wordsmith?  No chance, but his memoirs are out, and […]

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Far Below Moscow, the Burden of Free Will

It’s fitting that Russia’s newest railway addition, an homage to Fyodor Dostoevsky, will be built 60 meters below the city where the writer was born, making it one of the deepest in Moscow. “[Dostoevsky] cannot restrain himself. Out it tumbles upon us, hot, scalding, mixed, marvellous, terrible, oppressive–the human soul,” wrote Virginia Woolf on the Russian romantic (The Common Reader). And what could be more alienating–not to mention thematically faithful to Dostoevskian paradigms–than a railway station deeper and darker than […]

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