Well, this probably won’t help much, but my preferred source is a totally fictional narrative—Dumas’s Twenty years after. I find comfort in how it treats personal ambition, rivalry, motivation nuances (“for old times’ sake”/”for honour”/”for fame”/”for money”/”for family”...) without explicit judgement; I re-read it in early 2014, to ease myself into the thought that the political situation [in Kyiv] would likely get worse (and you probably can’t imagine how we wished that there would be no lives lost); and last but not least, I have, for personal reasons, largely fallen out of touch with some of my dear friends, and this novel gives me hope that I might be able to love them just as truly even decades later. I think it is worth reading.
I would also recommend Daniel Granin’s “Bison”, which is a biography of N. Timofeyev-Resovsky, or in the author’s words, “a book on honour and dishonour”.
Well, this probably won’t help much, but my preferred source is a totally fictional narrative—Dumas’s Twenty years after. I find comfort in how it treats personal ambition, rivalry, motivation nuances (“for old times’ sake”/”for honour”/”for fame”/”for money”/”for family”...) without explicit judgement; I re-read it in early 2014, to ease myself into the thought that the political situation [in Kyiv] would likely get worse (and you probably can’t imagine how we wished that there would be no lives lost); and last but not least, I have, for personal reasons, largely fallen out of touch with some of my dear friends, and this novel gives me hope that I might be able to love them just as truly even decades later. I think it is worth reading.
I would also recommend Daniel Granin’s “Bison”, which is a biography of N. Timofeyev-Resovsky, or in the author’s words, “a book on honour and dishonour”.