Saint Leo University

Women have always struggled to break through an invisible glass ceiling that separates them from their goals. Women are kept from attaining higher positions in business, they are kept from studying math and science, and are deterred from playing certain sports. However, once upon a time women were kept from being themselves. Many women were discouraged from trying to learn at all, instead kept in the confines of the home. Virginia Woolf’s “What if Shakespeare Had Had a Sister?” brings to light…

Have you ever been in a toxic environment? I’m not talking about the nuclear toxic either, but rather the one where you’re forced to be around people that are no good for you. Tobias Wolff, author of This Boy’s Life, was stuck in one as a young boy. His mother was known to pick out bad boyfriends and settled with one named Dwight, who is probably the worst one mentioned. He seems to have a strange aura around him and it shows through the way he treats Tobias. There are many more people in this…

Peaceful resistance to laws positively impacts a free society. According to dictionary.com, nonviolent resistance is the “refusal to obey a law considered unjust” (dictionary.com). Throughout history, this type of resistance has been used in a positive manner to help maintain a free society. Ranging from walking for salt to taking bus seats, these protests resulted in positive changes for the many and proved to those still facing oppression that violence is never the answer. Mohandas Gandhi is…

The Falsehood in Life and the Clarity of Death “Everything progressed until it began to approach the ideal he had set himself” (56). Ivan Ilyich lives his entire life according to the exact ideas and specifications that he expects of others and thinks others expect of him. He does everything, from marrying his wife to having children to decorating his house, the way that others have done in order to keep up the appearance of a happy, normal life. Ivan’s obsession with the way he appears to…

In The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ivan could be considered as one who takes things for granted especially life. Ivan is known for his working and quest to get higher on the social hierarchy because that is the most important thing to Ivan. He was caught in being the best, that he forgot how to live life respectively. Ivan also went into marriage with his wife without truly loving her. Therefore at the end of the day Ivan realizes that he had spent his entire life doing everything wrong and because…

Leo Tolstoy’s masterful novella, The Death of Ivan Ilych addresses the formation and continuation of cultural norms on a superficial society, propelled by wide-spread acceptance of unjust, unfulfilling means to happiness. The piece follows the life, and death, of Ivan Ilych, a dreadfully mundane man in a overbearing society, disillusioned by severe sickness and left alone to deal with the consequences of such discoveries. Tolstoy’s work successfully integrates the life of a judge as the means…

The Positive Impact of Leo Tolstoy “I love many things, I love many people.” These were the last words of Leo Tolstoy. Throughout his entire life, Tolstoy lived by those words as he became whom the world knows as ‘the greatest writer of the 19th century’. Leo Tolstoy positively impacted society by teaching: to make a difference, expand one's social circle, and to keep an open mind. Leo Tolstoy taught to make a difference. For a man of the upper class, Tolstoy made a notable…

Leo Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace deeply illustrates the lives of many characters. A compelling novel, Tolstoy maintains the characters’ verisimilitude through the use of body language and conflicts. The lives of Prince Andrei and Pierre -- two foil characters -- parallel each other as they embark on their journey towards a deeper self-understanding. Through the use of details, interpersonal and intrapersonal conflicts, and the subtle juxtaposition of Prince Andrei and Pierre, Leo Tolstoy is…

"My religion is based on truth and non-violence. Truth is my God. Non-violence is the means of realizing Him," said Mahatma Gandhi, one of the greatest revolutionary leaders in history. Though some people, like Malcolm X, during the Civil Rights movement did not agree with non-violence, non-violence is always the smartest and safest way of protesting. This is what Robert Kennedy wanted to teach the people with his speech on the day Martin Luther King Jr. died: that violence does not lead…

Born September 9th 1828 into a wealthy Russian household, Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy more commonly known as, Leo Tolstoy is renown as one of the greatest world literature prolific authors of all time. While only a child, Tolstoy’s parents died leaving it up to family members to raise him and educate him. His profound love of wanting to become a writer started at the age of twenty-three. According to Daniel Burt, Burt states that “no author has ever shown such a power of insight into the variety…