Existuje bytost odpornější než člověk? (Tři novely) – Kantor Vladimir (2014)

"Is there a being more repulsive than a human? Galachov read somewhere that in one African tribe, they forced the elderly to climb a tall tree. Then, strong men approached the tree and shook it. Those who fell and died were eaten, while those who managed to hold on were allowed to live a little longer." These words, which begin one of the three masterful novellas through which we introduce the Czech reader to the prose of the significant contemporary Russian writer and thinker Vladimir Kantor, regarded as a successor to F. M. Dostoevsky, V. S. Solovyov, and N. Berdyaev, seem to foreshadow a range of themes that unfold against the backdrop of simple human stories from the mundane, even banal, present of Russian life: the current state of human society and, more generally, civilization, the disintegration of traditional moral values, human deceit, egoism, the timeless question of the meaning of life, death, and human fate in general. Vladimir Kantor, whose primary interest lies in the philosophy of Russian history and culture, is not merely a moralist fighting against the ills of today's society and nostalgically or naively looking back to the distant past; his penetrating insights into the contemporary world and its possible future directions stem from...