Some Tales of Good and Evil

Some scholars have speculated that it was an epithet given to him for having once been a slave or a convict, whose faces were often branded or tattooed with dark ink. Others suggest that Mo took on the name as a way of identifying with the lowest class of people. Most historians now believe that Mo was a member of the lower artisan class who managed to climb his way to an official post. Fung Yu Lan suggests that Mo was a hsieh, a hereditary warrior who had lost his position and title, and made a living by offering his services to those who would employ him.

The original consisted of 71 chapters, of which only 53 remain. The social turmoil that beset China over several centuries had led Kong [better known in the West as Confucius] to stress tradition and ritual as a means of assuring order and harmony. It led Mo to argue for the very opposite. Mo distinguished between two principles: Someone who held to the principle of partiality, as Kong did, discounted the moral interests of other tribes or other states, or hated or despised them because they were of other tribes or other states.

It would be like attacking his own. He was much more hard-headed and pragmatic. Why, he asked, should I act to embrace others and to benefit them rather simply to benefit myself? He who benefits others, must also be benefitted by others. He who hates others, must also be hated by others. He who injures others must also be injured by others. What people required was food, clothing, work and peace, not elaborate funerals or rules of etiquette. Mo was even hostile to the playing of music which, he thought, provided amusement for the ruling class but not bread or peace for ordinary folk.

Modern universalism is primarily a social and political claim. Insofar as such universalism is plausible, it is because society is well enough developed to be able to steamroller traditional inequalities, differences and hierarchies, to afford equal treatment to all, and be able to think practically of common forms of governance across national and cultural boundaries. It was different in the premodern world. Inequality and hierarchy was essential to the functioning of such societies.

The possibilities of social transformation, and of the creation of a society built on the equal treatment of all, would have appeared to most people as fantastical. Universalists were inevitably seen as dreamers and utopians; and dreamers and utopians they were. Universalism necessarily had primarily to be not social but psychological in form, an argument less about how society should be constructed than about how we should regard others.

Given the constrained character of society, universalist ideas about regarding others as we regard ourselves could have seemed only fanciful. Mo criticized Kong not simply for his conservative adherence to tradition and his support for social discrimination but also for his rejection of God.

He rewarded with good fortune those who obeyed His commands, punished with calamity those that defied His will. Good and bad, for Mo, were not simply arbitrary notions defined by God. That which is good is good because it promotes peace, harmony, order and proper governance. What is right is right not merely because Heaven intends it.

Rather, Heaven intends it because it is right. Kong was not a humanist in the modern sense, but he talked little of God or of the spirit world, and neither played a role in his moral philosophy. What he was, was a deeply conservative thinker who sought to rationalize the ways of the past. For Kong, truth was to be found by excavating the past, reason a means of ensuring that social mores were not overturned. Mo possessed a mystical view of God, and of the spirit world. But he was forcefully radical, challenging traditional mores and trying to develop a rational argument for a radical universalism.

The relationship between Kong and Mo expresses the complexity of the relationship between faith, reason and morality, particularly in the premodern world. Job was a prosperous businessman, owning seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen and five hundred she-asses.

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Up in heaven God holds council with his angels, including Satan, then still an angel in Heaven. The Lord says of Job that no one on Earth shows such piety. Only because God has made him wealthy, Satan responds. Like two reckless gamblers intoxicated by their power over dice, God and Satan strike a wager. Satan sets about his work with relish. Job does not curse God for all this misfortune. God meets again with Satan. Satan accepts that Job has remained faithful to God.

But, he insists, were Job to face devastating illness, that faithfulness would ebb away: Three friends of Job, Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar, come to console him. God always rewards good and punishes evil, with no exceptions allowed. Job maintains that his suffering is unjustified as he has not sinned.

But he insists that the wicked are often allowed to flourish: God, he insists, is always correct in his conduct. He might, however, be forced to impose suffering not just upon the sinful, but upon the righteous, too, as a warning, or for moral betterment. Job was a righteous man. But in his insistence on putting his case before God, and making God answer to him, he is assuming that he possesses a superior moral standard. Such arrogance deserves divine punishment. What makes Job think that he has the right to question the Lord, he demands.

He is not subject to questions from His creatures. Job humbly acknowledges that he has spoken beyond the boundaries of his understanding in demanding an answer of God. Job lives on another years, living to see his children to the fourth generation and dying peacefully of old age. The Book of Job is a magnificent creation, one of the great works of Western literature. Read without sympathy, God may appear in it to be a callous gambler and a boastful bully, a Creator intoxicated with the sense of his own power.

But read as the early Israelites would have read it or rather heard it , as Job himself would have understood it, it is a narrative of great depth, both psychological and spiritual, and one that raises profound questions about the nature of righteousness, suffering and faith. At the heart of the book is an attempt to wrestle with the profound new questions raised by the emergence of monotheistic religions.

Why does evil exist? And why should one obey God? He is born to a princess who had secretly married her lover. He was eventually washed up on a distant uninhabited island where he is found by a gazelle, whose own fawn had been devoured by an eagle. The gazelle nurtures the infant as her own.

The boy initially lives as a beast, but begins to recognize that he is different from all the other creatures on the island. The deer that had nursed him eventually dies. In great distress, the boy begins to ponder the mystery of death. The first ever philosophical novel, and the first to strand its hero upon a desert island, there are few books that today lie as neglected as Hayy Ibn Yaqzan and yet historically have been more influential.

Ibn Tuffail was born in the first decade of the twelfth century near Granada in Muslim Iberia. He is said to have written numerous works on medicine, astronomy and philosophy. Almost all are lost, with the notable exception of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan. It is a novel infused with the ideas of Plato and Aristotle — or, at least, with the ideas of Plato and Aristotle as filtered through the Neoplatonism of Plotinus.

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Perhaps its greatest significance lies, however, in its belief in the ethical importance of rational contemplation, and in its insistence that such contemplation could, unaided, reach out to all the truths of the world. Hayy, the young boy, alone and untutored, embarks on that desert island on a journey of inquiry and self-discovery, slowly unraveling the ultimate mysteries of the cosmos not through revelation but through reason.

Reason, Ibn Tuffail suggests, is instantiated in human nature, and there is a natural progression of the human mind towards the discovery of truth.

He comes also to recognize the necessity of a Creator, and for such a Creator to exist outside time and space. True happiness comes only through people recognizing their kinship to the Creator and through diligently contemplating Him. The journey of Hayy toward a Neoplatonist vision of the cosmos mirrored that of the Muslim world itself.

It was only in the eighth century the Arab world discovered Plato and Aristotle. That discovery transformed the Arab world, and its understanding humanity, God and morality. It was eventually to transform the rest of the world too. This is a majestic and timely work. Anyone with a serious interest in the history and nature of modernity and the human condition would be the poorer for not reading it.

I read it last year and can certainly recommend it. The Mahabharata From The Quest for a Moral Compass , pp It is an epic struggle, one that transforms history and nearly destroys the world. The Book of Job Job was a prosperous businessman, owning seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen and five hundred she-asses.

I'll grant that the rambling narrative voice used here, one of his earlier stories, was later perfected "The Nose" and "The Overcoat," but I haven't got the time for this kind of nationalism. Or, for that matter, any type of nationalism. Luckily, Gogol learned to stop lecturing and tell a story by the end of his career.

Gogol's sense of irony here is so dry as to be magnificent. The same goes for the more satirical "Nose," which features that rarest of things, an unreliable third-person narrator. This one landed Gogol in some hot water with the Russian authorities, and he had to alter the scene of the nose going to church. They missed out on the funniest scene in the piece, but luckily it's been restored.

The third of the really great ones is "Nevsky Avenue," whose cinematic description of the street in question is beautiful; Gogol also has fun playing with time and perspective here, and pulls it off with much more style than he did with "The Portrait. Word on the street is that's really funny. That's what they do on the street these days, talk about which Gogol story is funniest.

I'm glad I finally took the plunge into Gogol, since I've been meaning to do so since I got into Dostoevsky. Who, incidentally, I would still say I preferred - he's a lot less hectoring, if also less surreal. I'll definitely read more of this guy in the future, although I've got my eye out for the preaching.

It was like you could skip whole fucking pages of "The Terrible Vengeance" and not have missed anything. Feb 04, Tyler Jones rated it it was amazing Shelves: If you don't like it when people write about themselves instead of the book they are supposed to be reviewing, then just skip this. Back in my university days there was no such thing as a comparative literature courses offered - if you wanted to study Russian Literature, you had to take a class from the languages department. Academia's insistence on compartmentaliz Warning: Academia's insistence on compartmentalizing literature into mother tongues even then struck me as stultifying.

I hope things have improved. Anyway, my interest in fiction was not restricted to English fiction, so I eagerly took the one class in Russian literature my University offered. I do not remember the professors name but only that it, and he himself, was short and sounded funny. A girl in the class said his name translated into "big oaf" in English, and "Balbes" does sound rather close to what I remember.

He had a high pitched voice and was almost always excited about whatever he was talking about. While I admired my professor's passion, I just didn't connect with the high-flung romantic passion of Pushkin or the too-cool disaffection of Lermontov. Then we spent a class on the short stories of Gogol and I knew I had discovered one of my Gods. After that class I devoured all his stories I could find. Gogol wrote about a world that was unbearably cruel and absurd, yet his humour was unflagging even as his outlook was dark.

More importantly, he may have been the first modern author in the sense that he wrote in a style that we today would call magic realism. His refusal to write in the ornately realistic style of his day was ground-breaking. But most important to me, Gogol represents a philosophy. He is concerned with the well-being of the marginalized in a sense, he is one of the first writers to try to use fiction as a tool to raise social consciousness and his deep humanism struck me as a vital thing I should strive to emulate.

That I have often slipped, and felt hatred toward my fellow man, is my own sin. When I repent, I pray to Gogol and I am forgiven. Sep 15, Joe rated it really liked it. Recommended by Goodreader and Trotskyite Brian T. Several of his tales explore evil as an an abstraction: The remaining stories are comic and absurd.

The Nose begins with a barber finding a completely intact human nose baked into a loaf of bread. The rest of the story concerns the nose's true owner trying to come to grips with a noseless existence. Folks looking for continuity or careful plot coherence will look in vain. By the end of The Nose, readers will be told that the nose in question is seen praying in church, riding about the streets of St.

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Petersburg, and being mistaken for a military officer. Golgol seems interested chiefly in stretching the imagination of the reader, telling a shocking story, and delighting in the moral depth and existential absurdity of ordinary people. Nathaniel Hawthorne meets Kakfa. Mar 03, Shama rated it really liked it. My god, what a nut-job!

Tales of Good and Evil, Help and Harm: Philip P. Hallie: www.newyorkethnicfood.com: Books

Gogol was a crazy, religious, depressed, repressed lunatic, but my gum, could he write. The stories in this collection ranged from Gothic to comedic with tidbits of the fantastic and macabre. I loved the progression of the stories as much as I loved the stories themselves. The book is put together quite well, and readers shouldn't have trouble shifting their perspectives from Gogol's major themes: Oh, My god, what a nut-job! Oh, and am I the only one who thinks Gogol's work is hilarious? Dec 01, Danny rated it really liked it.

Gogol set the bar by which all other Russian authors of his day were judged. His writing style is unorthodox by today's standards. But unorthodox as Gogol can be, his writing is thoroughly charming, and a very rewarding read in my opinion, even if the translation of this edition does as some of the other reviews here suggest leave something to be desired. It's vary hard to understate the impact that Gogol set the bar by which all other Russian authors of his day were judged.

It's vary hard to understate the impact that Gogol's stories, The Overcoat in particular, had on his world and the generations of Russians that came after him. The Overcoat marked the birth of an entirely new sort of character in Russian Literature; it was the first time a poor man of low class, meek constitution, and average bearing could be a viable hero. The saying "We all came out of Gogol's 'Overcoat'.

If you're looking to get into Russian Literature, a collection of Nikolai Gogol's short stories like this one is a great place to start. Feb 14, Alaa Baageel rated it liked it Shelves: Sep 27, Greg rated it liked it Shelves: I'm just making an acquaintance with Russian literature and this set of stories is simply strange. My favorite was "Nevsky Avenue" which for me is the one most easily understood. As for the others, they are good, but I think I need to know more about Russian history and read more Russian literature to "get" these stories.

Was "The Nose" about snobbery or vanity, or both? I'll read more Gogol, definitely, and I might come back to this set o I'm just making an acquaintance with Russian literature and this set of stories is simply strange. I'll read more Gogol, definitely, and I might come back to this set of stories again. Mar 02, Jill rated it liked it Shelves: The Portrait was really great, but was suspiciously similar to Dorian Gray - meaning I strongly suspect that Wilde ripped off Gogol.

The Nose was bizarre and reminded me a little of that French film, The Moustache. Some of the stories were somewhat dull, but I really think it's because Gogol's sentences average about seven paragraphs a piece. Really - it's exhausting! You get lost in between all the commas. I loved the originality, and there were pieces - certain phrases that were just perfectio The Portrait was really great, but was suspiciously similar to Dorian Gray - meaning I strongly suspect that Wilde ripped off Gogol.

I loved the originality, and there were pieces - certain phrases that were just perfection - beautifully descriptive. It's definitely Russian Ukranian. Lots of poverty and lots of cold. Mar 21, Jaime rated it liked it. I gather from scanning other Goodreads folks' reviews that people don't really "get" Gogol. I found the stories themselves to be funny and fantastical. I loved the matter-of-fact sinisterness of "The Portrait" and the bedtime scary-story feel of "The Terrible Vengeance.

For me, there's something endearing about how straightforwardly the speaker in each of these stories addresses the reader And the digressions about this or that character or back-story. Jun 06, Rachael rated it it was amazing. Jhumpa Lahiri piqued my interest. After devouring the Namesake, I felt compelled to give Gogol a try. My two favorites - hands down - were The Overcoat and the absurdist piece The Nose.

This is one that I may end up buying because I can see myself reading these again. Feb 15, Nate rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: Aug 02, Ahlam rated it liked it. I liked the "overcoat" and "the portrait".. However, "Terrible vengeance" was weird but entertaining.. I hated "The Nose".. Overall, I kind of liked the way the whole thing was written though so much wordiness and sometimes boring and unnecessary details.

Jan 26, Christine rated it it was amazing Shelves: Humorous and poignant, often unexpected, delightfully absurd. Everything that a piece of literature should be. Though 'The Nose' was particularly amusing. Jul 21, R. Byers rated it really liked it. Feb 06, Bob Newman rated it liked it. Six tales don't constitute author's best work This volume constitutes six stories by Gogol of which two are the most famous; "The Overcoat", a wonderful psychological story which was made into a film in the USSR many years ago, and "The Nose", a satire of Russian middle level officials of the early 19th century.

Taken as a book, though, these tales full of dreams, asides, and great prolixity are not a major literary landmark on the world stage. Russian literature, as one of the world's greatest c Six tales don't constitute author's best work This volume constitutes six stories by Gogol of which two are the most famous; "The Overcoat", a wonderful psychological story which was made into a film in the USSR many years ago, and "The Nose", a satire of Russian middle level officials of the early 19th century.

Russian literature, as one of the world's greatest collections of works, offers a lot more in my opinion. Gogol, while perhaps a brilliant star for some national literatures, can only be considered a minor writer in Russia, especially if read in English as translated by David Magarshack, whose style can hardly be called "contemporary". While it's true that Gogol had a good sense of humor, if a little bizarre, it comes across in this translation as childish. I must hasten to add that I don't know Russian. Though the idea is interesting, Gogol, as in several other stories, just doesn't know when to let go.

The story "Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt" contains lively humor and many colorful characters. I enjoyed it the most of all, but it was only the beginning of a larger work, which unfortunately seems never to have been completed. Some analysts see the Introduction by the translator have read into Gogol's work pre-revolutionary predictions of violent change or a rising up of the lower classes.

GOOD and EVIL

I think such an idea is far-fetched. Similarly, while it is true that Gogol's tales and stories do contain struggles between good and evil, the same can be said of an enormous number of folk tales, religious works, and literary pieces by writers in every language. It is interesting to read Gogol's work to widen your knowledge of Russian and world literature.

That is a source of satisfaction, but perhaps not enough. Several of the stories are good, but they don't measure up to his longer works"Dead Souls" and "The Government Inspector". I would read them first, before this lesser book. Apr 30, Raven rated it really liked it. Knowing that Gogol's short stories had a great influence on Russian literature, I went into the reading more out of literary obligation than of pure interest.

That being said, I was completely charmed by the writing and found myself enjoying Gogol's works from page 1. While a few of the stories felt bloated at times Nevsky Avenue, The Portrait , the majority of the collection was lively, on-point, and insightful. Would recommend to anyone who enjoys classic Russian literature, or who appreciate Knowing that Gogol's short stories had a great influence on Russian literature, I went into the reading more out of literary obligation than of pure interest. Would recommend to anyone who enjoys classic Russian literature, or who appreciates writing that isn't bound to the confines of reality.

Apr 07, Kelley rated it it was amazing. It was absurd, it was comic, it was unbelievable at times, but I enjoyed each short story. And there were some fairly cleverly hidden morals in there to be teased out some were more obvious than others. May 24, The Fat rated it really liked it. The Overcoat and The Nose are incredible but the other stories, while certainly worth reading, aren't quite on their level.

Dec 31, Andy rated it really liked it. I'd read Gogol's magnificent "The Overcoat" and think it's one of the best short stories ever written. What surprised me about the other stories here was collection was how Gothic some were, and how consistently good most of them were. He saves and saves for a new one, and discovers it makes him an entirely new man, his co-workers even hold a party in honor of his overcoat! This story really delves into the absurdity of the obsession with appearances, government bureaucracy, there's a lot of themes and ways to interpret this great story.

Gogol pokes much fun at men obsessed with their titles and appearance, and the relations between us. Deeper meanings aside, it's just a fun story overall. It's about a barber who finds a nose inside a loaf of bread. He goes out to dispose of it while the owner wakes up with no nose. The nose-less man rushes about, unsure what to do with himself, how to approach others or get redress.

This story has some good points, but it's largely at the edges and it feels a bit dated. It's an interesting example of a Gothic story in the Russian vein, but it's got too much overwrought dialogue, the characters are about as one-dimensional as a pancake. Despite the supposed patriotism and good versus evil theme going on here, which made me expect a heroic tale, this is a pretty grim story where evil often wins more than loses. The story follows a noble Cossack and his wife who are tormented by her evil father who uses sorcery to torment their entire family.

This was a hilarious story, really funny characters and situations.