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On Not Knowing Greek
Taken from The Common Reader, these essays take the form of a series of reflections on diverse literary topics, brought to life by Woolf' s extensive knowledge, lively wit, and piercing insight. "For it is vain and foolish to talk of knowing Greek, since in our ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys, since we do not know how the words sounded, or where precisely we ought to laugh, or how the actors acted, and between this foreign people and ourselves there is not only difference of race and tongue but a tremendous breach of tradition."
90 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1925
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357 people want to read
About the author
Virginia Woolf
1,824 books28.7k followers(Adeline) Virginia Woolf was an English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.
During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
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Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
April 6, 2024
On the whole, I would have to say, I enjoy reading Virginia Woolf’s critical and essayistic work as much as I enjoy reading the novels for which she is famous. Novels like Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) have long since established her as a leading figure among British modernist writers – a distinction that must have been quite a burden to bear.
With her criticism, by contrast, I sometimes find myself feeling that Woolf is having more fun – that, relieved from the pressure to produce Great Literature, she is somewhat more free to be herself. The essays collected in this short volume, under the title On Not Knowing Greek, demonstrate conclusively that Woolf knew that literary criticism was a deadly serious business that more than occasionally required a welcome touch of humour.
On Not Knowing Greek, as published by the Hesperus Press of London in 2008, consists of six essays that Woolf published in various presses and later collected in two volumes of essays, both of which (in 1925 and 1932) bore the title The Common Reader. In a helpful introduction, Woolf scholar Elena Gualtieri of the University of Sussex informs us that the title draws from the work of Dr. Samuel Johnson, and that the title may reflect a bit of trepidation on Woolf’s part regarding the merits of her essayistic work.
She needn’t have worried. All of the essays presented in this volume are delightful, and one does not have to have read all of the works mentioned in the essays to appreciate the merit of the essays.
The title essay, “On Not Knowing Greek,” is not actually about not knowing Greek; Woolf knew the language of classical Greece quite well, as is made clear by the untranslated passages from Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides that she includes in the essay. Rather, the subject matter of the essay is the difficulty of knowing the world and the mindset within which the ancient Greeks lived and wrote and experienced one another’s writing.
Just as Homer began his epic poems in medias res – with Achilles sulking in his tent outside Troy, or Penelope rebuffing impatient suitors at the royal palace of Ithaca – so Woolf begins her essay as if responding, mid-conversation, to a not-very-thoughtful opposing opinion:
For it is vain and foolish to talk of knowing Greek, since in our ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys, since we do not know how the words sounded, or where precisely we ought to laugh, or how the actors acted, and between this foreign people and ourselves there is not only difference of race and tongue but a tremendous breach of tradition. (p. 3)
I enjoyed Woolf’s speculations about how the people of classical Athens actually experienced the Greek literature that had such powerful influence on the British society of her time. For Woolf, the tragic dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides, or the comedies of Aristophanes, were meant to be delivered outdoors, in a declamatory manner, experienced first and foremost as an auditory and visual, rather than a reading, experience – something to be enjoyed at the Theatre of Dionysus on a fine spring or autumn day. “Dramatic [these plays] had to be,” Woolf tells us, “at whatever cost” (p. 11).
But then there would be the cold and darkness of winter, the heat of high summer (do not go to the Parthenon and the Acropolis in July or August), the occasional rainstorm – times that would not lend themselves to the performance of an outdoor drama. What then? “There must have been some place indoors where men could retire…where they could sit and drink, where they could lie stretched at their ease, where they could talk. It is Plato, of course, who reveals the life indoors” (p. 11), in dialogues like Phaedrus and The Symposium.
And “On Not Knowing Greek” ends on a strong and thought-provoking note, as Woolf states what she finds intellectually nourishing in the classical Greek outlook and lacking in the British society of her own day:
With the sound of the sea in their ears, vines, meadows, rivulets about them, [the Greeks] are even more aware than we are of a ruthless fate. There is a sadness at the back of life which they do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure, and it is to them that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age. (pp. 17-18)
Other essays in the On Not Knowing Greek collection are comparably engaging. In “Notes on an Elizabethan Play,” Woolf urges the reader to consider “lesser” Elizabethan playwrights rather than sticking with Shakespeare and Shakespeare alone, suggesting that “the plays of the lesser Elizabethans” can remind the modern reader of “how great a power the body of a literature possesses to impose itself” – compelling the reader, “even as we enjoy, [to] yield our ground or stick to our guns” (p. 19).
“Modern Fiction” shows us that Virginia Woolf knew how to deliver a healthy reality check. Writing at a time when literary modernism was all the rage – when every new High Priest of High Modernism was ready to wax eloquent about uncreated consciences of the race and whatnot – Woolf looks back to the work of earlier English authors, like Henry Fielding and Jane Austen, and advises all those fans of the faddishness of High Modernism to take a step back and re-evaluate:
It is doubtful whether, in the course of the centuries, though we have learnt much about making machines, we have learnt anything about making literature. We do not come to write better; all that we can be said to do is to keep moving, now a little in this direction, now in that, but with a circular tendency should the whole course of the track be viewed from a sufficiently lofty pinnacle. (p. 29)
In “The Russian Point of View,” Woolf considers the popularity, in her time, of Russian literature, and suggests that Russian literature is separated from its English reader by a couple of crucial factors. One is the difference between Russian and English culture, and the other is a question of language:
Of all those who feasted upon Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, and Tchekov during the past twenty years, not more than one or two perhaps have been able to read them in Russian. Our estimate of their qualities has been formed by critics who have never read a word or Russian, or seen Russia, or even heard the language spoken by natives – who have had to depend, blindly and implicitly, upon the work of translators. (p. 39)
Thomas Jefferson, who distrusted translations and preferred to read classic literature in the language in which it was written, would no doubt have appreciated Woolf’s caution regarding dependence on translators.
“The Modern Essay,” a review of editor Ernest Rhys’s 5-volume work Modern English Essays, mentions many essays that the contemporary North American reader may not have read; but I appreciated Woolf’s suggestion that “a good essay must have this permanent quality about it: it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out” (p. 60).
And “How Should One Read a Book?” has the subtitle “A paper read at a school”. Scholar and commentator Gualtieri aptly points out that this paper, delivered to a girls’ school audience in January of 1926, “was far from condescending” (p. vii). Perhaps Woolf looked at those schoolgirls and remembered when she was their age, knowing the burdens of gender discrimination that they would face. Whatever the case, I appreciated the spirit in which Woolf advised her youthful listeners, each time they took up a book, “to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions” (p. 61).
That invocation – of the rights and the power of the individual, inquiring human spirit – suffuses Woolf’s criticism as surely as it does her fiction. The same qualities that have caused generations of readers to love novels like Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse will be apparent to readers who take up this slim, telling volume with the title On Not Knowing Greek.
With her criticism, by contrast, I sometimes find myself feeling that Woolf is having more fun – that, relieved from the pressure to produce Great Literature, she is somewhat more free to be herself. The essays collected in this short volume, under the title On Not Knowing Greek, demonstrate conclusively that Woolf knew that literary criticism was a deadly serious business that more than occasionally required a welcome touch of humour.
On Not Knowing Greek, as published by the Hesperus Press of London in 2008, consists of six essays that Woolf published in various presses and later collected in two volumes of essays, both of which (in 1925 and 1932) bore the title The Common Reader. In a helpful introduction, Woolf scholar Elena Gualtieri of the University of Sussex informs us that the title draws from the work of Dr. Samuel Johnson, and that the title may reflect a bit of trepidation on Woolf’s part regarding the merits of her essayistic work.
She needn’t have worried. All of the essays presented in this volume are delightful, and one does not have to have read all of the works mentioned in the essays to appreciate the merit of the essays.
The title essay, “On Not Knowing Greek,” is not actually about not knowing Greek; Woolf knew the language of classical Greece quite well, as is made clear by the untranslated passages from Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides that she includes in the essay. Rather, the subject matter of the essay is the difficulty of knowing the world and the mindset within which the ancient Greeks lived and wrote and experienced one another’s writing.
Just as Homer began his epic poems in medias res – with Achilles sulking in his tent outside Troy, or Penelope rebuffing impatient suitors at the royal palace of Ithaca – so Woolf begins her essay as if responding, mid-conversation, to a not-very-thoughtful opposing opinion:
For it is vain and foolish to talk of knowing Greek, since in our ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys, since we do not know how the words sounded, or where precisely we ought to laugh, or how the actors acted, and between this foreign people and ourselves there is not only difference of race and tongue but a tremendous breach of tradition. (p. 3)
I enjoyed Woolf’s speculations about how the people of classical Athens actually experienced the Greek literature that had such powerful influence on the British society of her time. For Woolf, the tragic dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides, or the comedies of Aristophanes, were meant to be delivered outdoors, in a declamatory manner, experienced first and foremost as an auditory and visual, rather than a reading, experience – something to be enjoyed at the Theatre of Dionysus on a fine spring or autumn day. “Dramatic [these plays] had to be,” Woolf tells us, “at whatever cost” (p. 11).
But then there would be the cold and darkness of winter, the heat of high summer (do not go to the Parthenon and the Acropolis in July or August), the occasional rainstorm – times that would not lend themselves to the performance of an outdoor drama. What then? “There must have been some place indoors where men could retire…where they could sit and drink, where they could lie stretched at their ease, where they could talk. It is Plato, of course, who reveals the life indoors” (p. 11), in dialogues like Phaedrus and The Symposium.
And “On Not Knowing Greek” ends on a strong and thought-provoking note, as Woolf states what she finds intellectually nourishing in the classical Greek outlook and lacking in the British society of her own day:
With the sound of the sea in their ears, vines, meadows, rivulets about them, [the Greeks] are even more aware than we are of a ruthless fate. There is a sadness at the back of life which they do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure, and it is to them that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age. (pp. 17-18)
Other essays in the On Not Knowing Greek collection are comparably engaging. In “Notes on an Elizabethan Play,” Woolf urges the reader to consider “lesser” Elizabethan playwrights rather than sticking with Shakespeare and Shakespeare alone, suggesting that “the plays of the lesser Elizabethans” can remind the modern reader of “how great a power the body of a literature possesses to impose itself” – compelling the reader, “even as we enjoy, [to] yield our ground or stick to our guns” (p. 19).
“Modern Fiction” shows us that Virginia Woolf knew how to deliver a healthy reality check. Writing at a time when literary modernism was all the rage – when every new High Priest of High Modernism was ready to wax eloquent about uncreated consciences of the race and whatnot – Woolf looks back to the work of earlier English authors, like Henry Fielding and Jane Austen, and advises all those fans of the faddishness of High Modernism to take a step back and re-evaluate:
It is doubtful whether, in the course of the centuries, though we have learnt much about making machines, we have learnt anything about making literature. We do not come to write better; all that we can be said to do is to keep moving, now a little in this direction, now in that, but with a circular tendency should the whole course of the track be viewed from a sufficiently lofty pinnacle. (p. 29)
In “The Russian Point of View,” Woolf considers the popularity, in her time, of Russian literature, and suggests that Russian literature is separated from its English reader by a couple of crucial factors. One is the difference between Russian and English culture, and the other is a question of language:
Of all those who feasted upon Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, and Tchekov during the past twenty years, not more than one or two perhaps have been able to read them in Russian. Our estimate of their qualities has been formed by critics who have never read a word or Russian, or seen Russia, or even heard the language spoken by natives – who have had to depend, blindly and implicitly, upon the work of translators. (p. 39)
Thomas Jefferson, who distrusted translations and preferred to read classic literature in the language in which it was written, would no doubt have appreciated Woolf’s caution regarding dependence on translators.
“The Modern Essay,” a review of editor Ernest Rhys’s 5-volume work Modern English Essays, mentions many essays that the contemporary North American reader may not have read; but I appreciated Woolf’s suggestion that “a good essay must have this permanent quality about it: it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out” (p. 60).
And “How Should One Read a Book?” has the subtitle “A paper read at a school”. Scholar and commentator Gualtieri aptly points out that this paper, delivered to a girls’ school audience in January of 1926, “was far from condescending” (p. vii). Perhaps Woolf looked at those schoolgirls and remembered when she was their age, knowing the burdens of gender discrimination that they would face. Whatever the case, I appreciated the spirit in which Woolf advised her youthful listeners, each time they took up a book, “to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions” (p. 61).
That invocation – of the rights and the power of the individual, inquiring human spirit – suffuses Woolf’s criticism as surely as it does her fiction. The same qualities that have caused generations of readers to love novels like Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse will be apparent to readers who take up this slim, telling volume with the title On Not Knowing Greek.
December 13, 2020
While it wasn't a new favorite of mine I still found it very interesting to read her thoughts on translated works and found it a little funny I read the translated version of her essay.
October 22, 2024
ironic how for an essay called On Not Knowing Greek that the way Virginia Woolf thinks and writes about poetry is very greek
Read
June 23, 2025Interesting piece of Woolf’s literary criticism, feels conversational. She has such a clear and compelling view of the types of literature & how we should read.
“With the sound of the sea in their ears, vines, meadows, rivulets about them, they are even more aware than we are of a ruthless fate. There is a sadness at the back of life which they do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure, and it is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age.”
“With the sound of the sea in their ears, vines, meadows, rivulets about them, they are even more aware than we are of a ruthless fate. There is a sadness at the back of life which they do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure, and it is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age.”
January 28, 2025
com sempre, una mirada única i refrescant. tot el que toca ho converteix en poesia
January 1, 2022
Short essay on the difficulties of reading the Classics in translation, owing to the gap in experiences between reader and writer, and not knowing how the language may have been used. There's a bit of (unintentionally funny?) stereotyping in her own portrayal of English readers compared to American or modern Greek readers; English people reading differently because they're confined to being inside for half of the year.
But her conclusion still has some force to it. Read the classics anyway because of the intensity of the emotion that they portray; or of heading to a different world, even through a glass darkly.
I am intrigued to find multiple reviews on here in Italian and one in Swedish. I wonder what a modern Greek speaker would think of all this?
But her conclusion still has some force to it. Read the classics anyway because of the intensity of the emotion that they portray; or of heading to a different world, even through a glass darkly.
I am intrigued to find multiple reviews on here in Italian and one in Swedish. I wonder what a modern Greek speaker would think of all this?
August 7, 2020
“the way in which everybody has always behaved; and thus we understand them”
“For none of these dramatists had the licence which belongs to the novelist, and, in some degree, to all writers of printed books, of modelling their meaning with an infinity of slight touches which can only be properly applied by reading quietly, carefully, and sometimes two or three times over. Every sentence had to explode on striking the ear, however slowly and beautifully the words might then descend, and however enigmatic might their final purport be.”
January 5, 2024
A must read. Wonderfully crafted, delightfully insightful and dreadfully convicting. What drivel have I been reading?
“On six pages of Proust we can find more complicated and varied emotions than in the whole of Electra. But in the Electra or the Antigone we are impressed by something different, by something perhaps impressive-by heroism itself, by fidelity itself.”
“On six pages of Proust we can find more complicated and varied emotions than in the whole of Electra. But in the Electra or the Antigone we are impressed by something different, by something perhaps impressive-by heroism itself, by fidelity itself.”
October 13, 2024
Gli ultimi 2 articoli sono oro!
August 19, 2022
loved the parts about the greeks and the russians :) beautifully written
November 26, 2018
Anche la critica letteraria, nelle mani sapienti di Virginia Woolf, si trasforma in un acutissimo punto di osservazione del nostro essere, uomini e donne, lettori e lettrici.
Eschilo, Sofocle, Euripide ma anche Saffo e Platone non avrebbero cittadinanza tra chi non sa neppure come si pronunciassero le loro parole. Tanto più si fatica a cogliere il senso di traduzioni che, anche nel migliore dei casi, lascia gli antichi autori con le vesti (esteriori e interiori) lacere come fossero stati investiti da un treno o da una tempesta violentissima.
E che dire dei tre grandi russi Čechov Dostoevsky Tolstoj, della loro ossessione per l’anima e la vita, incuranti di dove come perché i loro personaggi si trovino a dialogare dei drammi e delle felicità più profonde?
Beati allora gli inglesi che leggono Shakespeare in tutta la sua capacità di posare e dosare le parole, incurante di quella bramosia per l’intreccio e la trama che il pubblico chiede a gran voce e che soffoca i suoi coevi elisabettiani.
Ma l’invito di Virginia Woolf non è certo a non leggere, al contrario è a essere liberi lettori, liberi dagli autori e dalle biblioteche e soprattutto dai critici. Leggere con mente aperta e poi rileggere per capire l’insieme già letto nel particolare. E se i nostri ormai trisnonni quando andavano a letto la sera dormivano della grossa, dice ancora Woolf, chi li ha seguiti le sere le passa a discorrere, a meditare, a interrogarsi e nasce così la nostra letteratura, l’arte magistrale dei romanzi, la verità denudata della poesia, i libri di storia con cui cerchiamo affannosamente di convincerci ancora di più dei nostri pregiudizi.
È un piccolo gioiello da leggere lentamente questa raccolta di quattro saggi letterari, con la lentezza che merita tutto il Gruppo di Bloomsbury, dalla biografia della Regina Vittoria di Litton Strachey al coltissimo Aspetti del romanzo di E. M. Forster. E magari da rileggere una seconda volta per capire l’essenza di ogni fiore appena sfiorato nel giardino dei libri di Virginia Woolf.
Eschilo, Sofocle, Euripide ma anche Saffo e Platone non avrebbero cittadinanza tra chi non sa neppure come si pronunciassero le loro parole. Tanto più si fatica a cogliere il senso di traduzioni che, anche nel migliore dei casi, lascia gli antichi autori con le vesti (esteriori e interiori) lacere come fossero stati investiti da un treno o da una tempesta violentissima.
E che dire dei tre grandi russi Čechov Dostoevsky Tolstoj, della loro ossessione per l’anima e la vita, incuranti di dove come perché i loro personaggi si trovino a dialogare dei drammi e delle felicità più profonde?
Beati allora gli inglesi che leggono Shakespeare in tutta la sua capacità di posare e dosare le parole, incurante di quella bramosia per l’intreccio e la trama che il pubblico chiede a gran voce e che soffoca i suoi coevi elisabettiani.
Ma l’invito di Virginia Woolf non è certo a non leggere, al contrario è a essere liberi lettori, liberi dagli autori e dalle biblioteche e soprattutto dai critici. Leggere con mente aperta e poi rileggere per capire l’insieme già letto nel particolare. E se i nostri ormai trisnonni quando andavano a letto la sera dormivano della grossa, dice ancora Woolf, chi li ha seguiti le sere le passa a discorrere, a meditare, a interrogarsi e nasce così la nostra letteratura, l’arte magistrale dei romanzi, la verità denudata della poesia, i libri di storia con cui cerchiamo affannosamente di convincerci ancora di più dei nostri pregiudizi.
È un piccolo gioiello da leggere lentamente questa raccolta di quattro saggi letterari, con la lentezza che merita tutto il Gruppo di Bloomsbury, dalla biografia della Regina Vittoria di Litton Strachey al coltissimo Aspetti del romanzo di E. M. Forster. E magari da rileggere una seconda volta per capire l’essenza di ogni fiore appena sfiorato nel giardino dei libri di Virginia Woolf.
May 11, 2024
beautiful. her style still breathes throughout even an essay, and though they read like thoughts fluttering through your mind, it’s calculated, and its wonderful. the argument is that something is lost in translation, when you can’t hear how the sound of the greek affects its meaning and impression, and i think the metaphors she slips in throughout attempt to do just that — create an affect that impresses on the reader a meaning we can’t grasp. kind of captures the beauty of translating vs just reading. and hit the nail on the boringness of even the best translations lol — it takes like 30 words in english to just convey the meaning of maybe 2 lines or so of latin or greek, and then it’s hard to color the arts hidden in the words without further diluting the meaning. some parts of the essay definitely flew over my head, though.
other people already said this but here’s my favorite quote:
“Penelope crosses the room; Telemachus goes to bed; Nausicaa washes her linen; and their actions seem laden with beauty because they do not know that they are beautiful, have been born to their possessions, are no more self-conscious than children, and yet, all those thousands of years ago, in their little islands, know all that is to be known. With the sound of the sea in their ears, vines, meadows, rivulets about them, they are even more aware than we are of a ruthless fate. There is a sadness at the back of life which they do not attempt to mitigate.”
lovely…
other people already said this but here’s my favorite quote:
“Penelope crosses the room; Telemachus goes to bed; Nausicaa washes her linen; and their actions seem laden with beauty because they do not know that they are beautiful, have been born to their possessions, are no more self-conscious than children, and yet, all those thousands of years ago, in their little islands, know all that is to be known. With the sound of the sea in their ears, vines, meadows, rivulets about them, they are even more aware than we are of a ruthless fate. There is a sadness at the back of life which they do not attempt to mitigate.”
lovely…
Read
December 4, 2022“penelope crosses the room; telemachus goes to bed; nausicaa washes her linen; and their actions seem laden with beauty because they do not know that they are beautiful, have been born to their possessions, are no more self-conscious than children, and yet, all those thousands of years ago, in their little islands, know all that is to be known. with the sound of the sea in their ears, vines, meadows, rivulets about them, they are even more aware than we are of a ruthless fate.”
April 8, 2020
Intressanta tankegångar kring översatt litteratur, i denna text fokus vid grekisk litteratur översatt till engelska. Jag håller med om att översatt litteratur ofta är svår då den förlorar en stor del av den känsla och humor författaren ville förmedla i sin ursprungstext.
December 20, 2020
These should probably be 3.5 stars. I've never been a massive fan of classic essays, because they tend to meander and I lose track of the thesis or what the point is. That said, I read it because I ADORE Virginia Woolf. I still like her novels better, but this was fun anyway.
November 9, 2025
hard to read as a young reader who isn't British, but worthwhile! I found it especially inspiring how she was able to weave poetry and prose throughout her essays- deffinetly a style I'll try to replicate in my own writing.
July 29, 2018
È un piccolo saggio filosofico sulla letteratura. Non mi ha entusiasmato e mi ha annoiato abbastanza, a parte l'ultima parte dedicata al lettore e al rapporto con la lettura e il libro.
April 2, 2021
A masterful essay on reading the ancient greeks....Homer, Sappho, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes, Plato...
November 4, 2021
The odd lovely passage but didn't relate to these essays. Analysis felt generalist, classist and nationalistic in argument.
February 25, 2022
Kinda lost her when she talked about translations, but otherwise insightful about the differences between modern English literature and the Greek classics.
August 17, 2023
quite literally the best thing i’ve ever read. wish i was joking. read this pls
January 30, 2025
Alr hop off bruh 😭😭 the greeks are dead sophocles ain’t gonna fuck u bro
November 18, 2025
“But truth is various; truth comes to us in different disguises; it is not with the intellect alone that we perceive it.”
November 21, 2025
“Does not the whole of Greece heap itself behind every line of its literature?”
she’s just like me
she’s just like me
February 1, 2020
Avendo studiato per diversi anni le principali tematiche trattate in questo libro, mi aspettavo qualcosa di un po' diverso. Ho infatti trovato questi saggi molto più eruditi di quel che pensavo. Nonostante l'ammirevole sfoggio di cultura presente in questi brevi testi, preferisco di gran lungo Virginia Woolf in veste di scrittrice di romanzi.
Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews