Canadian Reflections on a Russian in Dresden‪.‬

BRUCE WARD is a professor of religious studies at Thorneloe College, Laurentian University, where he also directs the interdisciplinary MA in Humanities. He is the author of Dostoevsky's Critique of the West: The Quest for an Earthly Paradise and has also published articles on Nietzsche and Camus. Dresden was one of the great cultural centres of Europe - and a place of little military significance - when it was firebombed by the Allies in the closing months of the Second World War. In subsequent years, the Russians made off with many of the surviving art treasures, and the East German regime rebuilt much of the city in the Soviet Grotesque style. (They needed a great deal of space just to house their thousands of Stasi agents and the intelligence files they accumulated.) Indeed, Dresden has suffered more than its share of jackboots and secret police, but as Dostoevsky discovered when he was a resident, a place with so much history cannot help but give life to invigorating new "great ideas."