In out-of-the-way Slovak villages we fairly often encounter people who have something by “Checkoff” on a shelf and, since they’ve read this cheap hackwork, they think they’re initiates competent to discuss the great Russian classic themes such as God, love, immortality, crime, punishment and death. But actually it’s hard to discuss the great questions of being with people brought up on these copies of “the Russian classics”, because although at first glance the Russian classics by their choice of themes, characters and settings truly are reminiscent of Dostoyewski, Toolstoy and Turgeneff, on a second reading their values cease to be of the present day. Daniel Majling has gathered these stories and published them in The Ruzzian Clazzics.
