"After work Yakov stayed in his room. He read by lamplight--though Nikolai Maximovitch had promised to install an electric bulb--for hours each night. His reading in the past was what he had accidentally come across; he now read what he wanted to know. ... And he devoured two newspapers every day, though they often gave him the shivers, both things reported as fact, and things hinted at; for instance, Rasputin and the Empress, new plots of terrorists, threats of pogroms, and the possibility of a Balkan war. So much was new to him; how is one to know all he ought to know? He then began to haunt the bookshops in the Podol in his free time, searching for inexpensive books. ... And Russian history fascinated him. He went through stacks of pamphlets on the shelves in the rear of the shops. He read some on serfdom, the Siberian penal system -- a terrifying account he had found in a bushel the bookseller had winked at. He read about the revolt and the destruction of the Decembrists, and a fascinating account of the Narodniki, idealists of the 1870s who had devoted themselves to the peasants in an impulsive attempt to stir them to social revolution, were rebuffed by them, and turned from peasant-mysticism to terrorism. Yakov also read a short biography of Peter the Great, and after that a horrifying account of the bloody destruction of Novgorod by Ivan the Terrible. It had entered the madman's head that the city intended treason to him, so he had ordered a wooden wall built around it to prevent escape. Then he marched in with his army, and after putting his subjects through the cruellest tortures, daily slaughtered thousands of them. This went on in increasing savagery, the sound of horror rising to the sky as the wailing mothers watched their children being roasted alive and thrown to wild dogs. At the end of five weeks, sixty thousand people, maimed, torn, broken apart, lay dead in the foul-smelling streets as disease spread. Yakov was sickened. Like a pogrom -- the very worst. The Russians make pogroms against the Russians -- it went on throughout their history. What a sad country, he thought, amazed by what he had read, every possible combination of experiences, where black was white and black was black; and if the Russians, too, were massacred by their own rulers and died like flies, who were then the Chosen People? Fatigued by history, he went back to Spinoza, rereading chapters on biblical criticism, superstition, and miracles which he knew almost by heart. If there was a God, after reading Spinoza he had closed up his shop and become an idea."

- Bernard Malamud, The Fixer