Andrew D. Kaufman > Quotes

“Not only had his wife Anna made Dostoyevsky’s creations possible, but, in a way, Anna was the [female] ideal behind his creations.”
― Andrew D. Kaufman, The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky

“Remember this, Anya,” Dostoyevsky told his wife on his deathbed, “I always loved you passionately and was never unfaithful to you even in my thoughts.”
― Andrew D. Kaufman, The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky

“His wife Anna’s presence can be felt everywhere in these final years of Dostoyevsky’s life: in his writings, his speeches, in the very fact of his physical survival.”
― Andrew D. Kaufman, The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky

“Standing quietly in the shade of the literary giant Dostoyevsky, his wife Anna is often erased from the historical record.”
― Andrew D. Kaufman, The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky

“His wife Anna was the living embodiment of the principles of Russian courage, moral integrity, and active love that had become central to Dostoyevsky’s worldview.”
― Andrew D. Kaufman, The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky

“Anna Dostoyevskaya found a purpose to guide her life: to honor her own experiences and potential while celebrating the work of Dostoyevsky, the artist, the man, she loved.”
― Andrew D. Kaufman, The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky

“Dostoyevsky’s widow insisted that her husband was to literature what the physicist-founder of the X-ray was to the human body: the inventor of a wholly new means of peering inside the human soul.”
― Andrew D. Kaufman, The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky

“His widow Anna dedicated most of her energy in her later years to shaping Dostoyevsky’s legacy and presenting it to the world.”
― Andrew D. Kaufman, The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky

“Thus began Anna Dostoyevskaya’s career as Russia’s first sole woman publisher, a career that would in time wrest Dostoyevsky out of debt and continue to provide for their family for almost the next four decades.”
― Andrew D. Kaufman, The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky

“Beyond participating in Dostoevsky’s creative work as his stenographer, first reader, and editor, his wife Anna also controlled all other aspects of their publishing enterprise.”
― Andrew D. Kaufman, The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky

“Yet, in spite of such pervasive, even relentless injustice, the best Russians I know display a remarkable inner strength and a commitment to living with as much dignity as they can.”
― Andrew D. Kaufman, Give War and Peace a Chance: Tolstoyan Wisdom for Troubled Times

“or rather cause us to hunker down in little bunkers of self-involvement? And when we find ourselves confronted with a less-than-ideal work environment, do we merely trade our large spirits for the smaller comforts of job security, or, like Captain Tushin, find some way to infuse the mundane madness of the workplace with the spark of our own inspiration?”
― Andrew D. Kaufman, Give War and Peace a Chance: Tolstoyan Wisdom for Troubled Times

“No matter how old or how sick you are, how much or little you have done, your business in life not only isn’t finished, but hasn’t yet received its final, decisive meaning until your very last breath.” This feisty, life-affirming spirit underlies”
― Andrew D. Kaufman, Give War and Peace a Chance: Tolstoyan Wisdom for Troubled Times

“Once we’re thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost; but it’s only here that the new and the good begins.” —War and Peace, Volume 4, Part 4, Chapter 17”
― Andrew D. Kaufman, Give War and Peace a Chance: Tolstoyan Wisdom for Troubled Times

“one of the most famous of his later works of nonfiction, The Kingdom of God Is Within You, he responded directly to this criticism. “Blessedness,” Tolstoy writes in that book, first published in Germany, in 1894, after being banned in Russia, “consists in progress towards perfection; to stand still in any condition whatever means the cessation of this blessedness.” To tell somebody that striving toward such a high ideal is hopelessly naïve, Tolstoy writes, is just like telling a man who is struggling on a swift river and is directing his course against the current, that it is impossible to cross the river against the current, and that to cross it he must point in the direction of the point he wants to reach. In reality, in order to reach the place to which he wants to go, he must row with all his strength toward a point much higher up.”
― Andrew D. Kaufman, Give War and Peace a Chance: Tolstoyan Wisdom for Troubled Times