This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com

Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is on Virgil’s Aeneid. We discuss the distinction between the Greek and Roman character; Virgil’s posthumous canonization as prophet and magician; his belated contrivance on Homer’s model of a founding epic for Rome and its possible source in elite and imperial patronage; the poem’s decadent evasion of the martial destiny it narrates; its ambiguous portrait of love and war; the metaphysics of its underworld; its contest of masculine and feminine and interest in queerness; the mythical archetypes (Venus, Juno, Saturn, Mars, Diana) it mobilizes; and more. We end with Paglia’s stern reading of its sexual personae and Borges’s warm tribute to Virgil as patron of poetry. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com

Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, is the third in a three-part sequence on The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. In this episode, we consider Alyosha’s assembly of his young apostles, Ivan’s encounter with the devil, Smerdyakov’s confession, and the trial of Dmitri, all with an eye toward elaborating the novel’s social and spiritual themes. Plus: could Alyosha be the real killer? I begin and end with a comparison among The Magic Mountain, Anna Karenina, and The Brothers Karamazov, and conclude with reflections on Tolstoy vs. Dostoevsky from Georg Lukács and Susan Sontag. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com

Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 20 minutes are free, is the second in a three-part sequence on The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. After a proem triangulating Dostoevsky with Žižek and Tarkovsky, I move on to the discuss perhaps the novel’s richest and most famous episodes—Ivan’s return of his ticket to God and parable of the Grand Inquisitor and the life and homilies of the Elder Zosima—and what they tell us about totalitarianism and freedom, atheism and Christianity and more. We further explore the narrative’s tangled romances, the developing murder plot, and metafictional reflections on Dostoevsky’s art of the novel. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com

Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 20 minutes are free, is the first in a three-part sequence on The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. We discuss the novel’s themes of self-sacrifice, the corruption of innocence, contradictions and dialectics, sensuality vs. intellectualism vs. spirituality, domination and sadism, the roles of religious elders and holy fools, and more, plus some remarks on translation and aesthetics, and a startling poetic appearance of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com

Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the third in a three-part sequence on Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. We discuss Tolstoy’s anti-political natural politics of the scholar, the peasant, and the mother, and his corresponding rejection of liberalism; his critique of modern art and his vindication of the novel from his own anti-aestheticism; his innovation in stream-of-consciousness narrative technique; his abandonment of materialism, philosophy, and reason and his embrace of faith in their stead, as relayed in the novel’s autobiographical passages; his controversial move toward pacifism in the novel’s final pages despite the contemporaneous social atmosphere of pan-Slavic war fever; and more, plus an opening consideration of the Tom Stoppard-scripted 2012 film adaptation. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com

Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the second in a three-part sequence on Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. We discuss the novel’s themes of Russian political, economic, and social reform; women’s place in society; the relationship between religion and conscience; the limitations of ideology as against a direct experience of reality; the importance of art as a disclosure of truth; the wisdom of childhood; and more. The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com

Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the first in a three-part sequence on Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. We discuss the novel’s style, symbols, and motifs; its portraits of nature and labor, sex and death, aristocracy and peasantry, ideology and life, virtue and religion, and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com

Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 20 minutes are free, is the final in a four-part sequence on Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain. It primarily concerns the novel’s culminating theme: the Bildungsroman, with its cultivation of the hero’s soul, as a secularized alchemical transformation of matter into spirit, not to mention this Bildung’s prospect in a modernity characterized by the decadence of culture and the frenzy of apocalyptic war. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com

Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the third in a four-part sequence on Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain. Here we examine the intense paradoxes of the novel’s political debate between liberal humanism and Catholic communist totalitarianism; its sublime excursion into nature; its vision of civilization as sustained by sacrificial violence; its epiphanic exaltation of love over any one ideological position; its depiction of a major character’s death; its intimation of the persistence of secret societies and ancient mystery cults in modern politics and religion; and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com

Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the second in a four-part sequence on Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain. We further examine the novel’s philosophy of time; discuss its critique of Enlightenment progress and vision of cutting-edge technology (x-rays, cinema) as a paradoxically archaic, atavistic, and magical phenomenon; explore its Orientalism (especially as applied to Russia) and eroticism; consider its thesis on life as a sexual excitation and disease of matter; and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall: