The Living Life

23 hrs. 18 min.

Language Russian

Author Vikenty Veresaev

Narrator Oborotov Yury

Description

V. V. Veresaev’s talent was unusually multifaceted. It seems there is no area of literary creativity in which he did not work. He wrote novels, novellas, stories, essays, poems, plays, literary-philosophical treatises; he worked as a literary scholar, literary critic, publicist, and translator. Yet despite a long life in literature in a turbulent era of social upheavals, and despite the multi-layered nature of his literary work,

V. V. Veresaev was a writer of astonishing inner unity. At the age of twenty-two, on October 24, 1889, he wrote in his diary: “...let a person feel brothers all around—feel it with the heart, involuntarily. For this is the solution to all questions, the meaning of life, happiness... And even if only one such spark is thrown!” The entire life and literary path of V. V. Veresaev is the search for an answer to the question of how to make a society of people-brothers a reality. That ideal remained unchanged—the struggle for which made the writer give his whole heart, his talent, and everything he had.

The book is dedicated to a comparative analysis of the works of F. M. Dostoevsky (“The Man is Cursed”) and L. N. Tolstoy (“Long Live the Whole World!”). 2nd book—“Apollo and Dionysus” (1915), a critique of F. Nietzsche’s views.

“Living Life,” written at the beginning of our century, V. V. Veresaev (1867–1945) considered his best book. In it, he believed, he found an answer to the main question of humankind—what is the meaning of life? The philosophy he developed freed him from many torments of the soul, becoming a compass in dealings and relationships with people. According to the writer, for those who embraced the ideas of “Living Life,” it helped them get rid of all kinds of complexes, gave them a sense of joy of being. In this edition, alongside the famous philosophical essay on Dostoevsky, L. Tolstoy, and Nietzsche, some other related works by Veresaev are also published, as well as several translations of Hellenic poetry “From the Homeric Hymns,” which resonate with the ideas and mood of “Living Life.”