Goodnight to one of the 20th century's most straightforward and affecting writers. Read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch if you haven't already--it's quietly devastating in a way only the great Russian novelists can be, appealingly simple but spiritually rich, like Tolstoy's later fiction. And its now-late author, in his stubborn Orthodoxy and distrust of the secular West, was always Dostoevsky's greatest heir.
I am a third-year PhD student at the University of Georgia specializing in Existentialist and Southern literature. I live in Tallahassee with my wife, Victoria, a PhD student at Florida State University.