Author: Martin Kalyniuk
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Orthodoxy & Evolution
I What I’ll write, as always, will likely prove unpopular. But to say what I think, when I have thought much about an issue, especially if the issue itself is consistently brought up before me, is an imperative I have strongly felt all of my life. Of late, more articles and opinion pieces than I’ve…
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Sentenced to Life
For Ekaterina Kalyniuk November 16, 1916—August 24, 2014 Где смерти больше нет 1 Смейся, смейся! Я сам смеюсь над собою! Думаю, и не могу вздумать, куда девался ум мой. Она меня не любит. Laugh, laugh! I laugh at myself too! I cannot imagine how I could have lost my head like that. She doesn‘t even…
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In Defense of Snobbery
I was fired last Sunday. Good news, I know! For you see, in addition to literary excellence, I supplement my otherwise inconsistent income by wait-staff work. On that unpropitious day, while only just recuperating from an extended illness that made certain my final pay would be less than it ought ordinarily to have been, I…
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Free-Thought Free-for-All
This daring, edgy essay in defence of free-thought and the untiring, unstoppable progress of science was originally published the day after it was delivered on FreeThoughtLand—a Geocities site since down. Putin did this—and I have the Youtube clip and Tweets to prove it. But I defer that exposé to another day and, rather, present to…
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Bulgakov Against Atheism
“We will strike out against Bulgakovism!”[i] And Bulgakov returned fire. I would have preferred a title more along the lines of “Bulgakov Against Little-mindedness.” “Narrow-mindedness” maybe? But it seems to me, and I believe it seemed to him, that atheism is sufficiently synonymous with either. Mikhail Bulgakov is my favourite writer. My teacher—Headmaster of the…
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Two Sides to Every Chessboard
As never before since the dissolution of the USSR, the very real, deep and elemental differences between the way Russia thinks and sees things, and the way the West looks at the same things and interprets them, are emerging in vivid detail. This phenomenon is most evident in the way Russia and the West perceive each…
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A New Symphony
The Russian Federation today is an Orthodox power, even though not a monarchical one. It is a democracy. Authoritarian—not liberal. Orthodox—and not secular. The Church and the State are mutually supportive, the initiative residing in whichever’s sphere the issue at hand belongs. There still remain things that concern solely the one or are the particular province…
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Gogol & Sacral Monarchy
“The Rule of many is not good. Let there be one ruler, One king.” —Iliad, book II, 203-204 It is possible that there is a further level of national unity, an avenue to which is opened by Holy Orthodoxy. As Konstantin Malofeev, founder of Tsargrad TV and Chairman of the St Basil the Great Charitable…
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Gogol & The Russian World
Nikolai Gogol is not a writer well-known in the West. The picture of him one gets in English-language sources—Wikipedia and introductions to translations of his fiction—is of a talented but unfulfilled writer. A crypto-Ukrainian nationalist despite never writing in Ukrainian, even when writing home to his mother. A religious fanatic towards the end of his life…
The Soul of the East 