Academics From Russia

"The worldwide sensation created by the appearance in 1961 of a brief poem, "Babi Yar," by Yevgeni Yevtushenko , condemning Nazi and prerevolutionary antisemitism, and the mutilation by Soviet censorship of Babi Yar (1966; Eng. 1967, revised 1970), a documentary novel by Anatoli Kuznetsov about the Nazi massacre of Soviet Jews in a ravine near Kiev, demonstrate that, in contrast to other areas of Soviet life, there was no real thaw in Soviet literature's treatment of Jewish themes."

"I was overjoyed when I read Yevtushenko's "Babi Yar"; the poem astounded me. It astounded thousands of people…People knew about Babi Yar before Yevtushenko's poem, but they were silent. And when they read the poem, the silence was broken. Art destroys silence."

"In general, in poetry and literature, I am among those people who believe that too much is indispensable."

"I love sport because I love life, and sport is one of the basic joys of life"

"[I] do not like poems that resemble hay compressed into a geometrically perfect cube. I like it when the hay, unkempt, uncombed, with dry berries mixed in it, thrown together gaily and freely, bounces along atop some truck—and more, if there are some lovely and healthy lasses atop the hay—and better yet if the branches catch at the hay, and some of it tumbles to the road."

"И если умирает человек, с ним умирает первый его снег, и первый поцелуй, и первый бой..."

"No people are uninteresting. Their fate is like the chronicle of planets. Nothing in them is not particular, and planet is dissimilar from planet."

"A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can be only a footnote."

"Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?"

"So on and on we walked without thinking of rest passing craters, passing fire, under the rocking sky of '41 tottering crazy on its smoking columns."

"The hell with it. Who never knew the price of happiness will not be happy."

"Give me a mystery – just a plain and simple one – a mystery which is diffidence and silence, a slim little, barefoot mystery: give me a mystery – just one!"

"Over Babiy Yar there are no memorials. The steep hillside like a rough inscription. I am frightened. Today I am as old as the Jewish race."

"No Jewish blood runs among my blood, but I am as bitterly and hardly hated by every anti-semite as if I were a Jew. By this I am a Russian."

"In 1956 Shapiro had been very actively investigating the so-called $\tau-\theta$ problem, which had been puzzling physicists for a long time. Shapiro came to the conclusion that the only possible explanation could be the parity non-conservation in this decay of mesons... Landau, when Shapiro presented him the paper, laughed at such an idea -- without Landau's holy consent Shapiro's paper could not be published. It remained on his desk, where I saw it many months before Lee and Yang submitted their paper for publication. So, because of Landau, Soviet physics lost one Nobel prize. A similar case is reported by Landau's closest collaborator, A.A. Abrikosov. Landau's negative attitude to Abrikosov's theory had delayed the discovery of superconductivity II for about four years."

"It is Landau’s invention—as it may, I feel, be fairly called—of the order parameter that is so important but often underappreciated... Landau’s concept of the order parameter, indeed, brought light, clarity, and form to the general theory of phase transitions, leading eventually, to the characterization of multicritical points and the understanding of many characteristic features of ordered states. But in 1944 a bombshell struck! Lars Onsager, by a mathematical tour de force, deeply admired by Landau himself, computed exactly the partition function and thermodynamic properties of the simplest model of a ferromagnet or a fluid... the nature of the critical singularities disagreed profoundly—as I will explain below—with essentially all the detailed predictions of the Landau theory (and of all foregoing, more specific theories)."

"Once, lecturing in Moscow during his last visit to the USSR, Niels Bohr was asked how he had succeeded in creating such a famous and first-class school of theoretical physics. He answered: "Probably because I have never been ashamed of admitting to my students that I am a fool." Bohr's lecture was translated into Russian by Landau's closest collaborator, E. Lifshitz, who translated it: "Probably because I have never been ashamed to tell my students that they are fools." Lifshitz's mistranslation caused a lot of laughter among the listeners. Lifshitz became aware of his mistake, corrected himself, and apologized. Kapitza, who was present, remarked that this mistranslation had not been accidental at all: "Precisely here lies the difference between Bohr's and Landau's schools of theoretical physics.""

"The idea seems to exist that there can be an absolutely continuous transition between the liquid and crystalline state (analogous to the transition liquid-gas), which would require the existence of a miraculous state which is neither isotropic nor anisotropic."

"People who hear of some extraordinary phenomenon start proposing to explain it with improbable hypotheses. First consider the simplest explanation: that it's all nonsense."

"BEWARE, HE BITES!"

"In the 1930s Landau was already saying, "I am one of the few universal physicists"; after the death of Enrico Fermi, this became "I am the last of the universal physicists"."

"A method is more important than a discovery, since the right method will lead to new and even more important discoveries."

"In 1958, Landau and certain other seminar participants were highly enthusiastic about the new Heisenberg theory in which all particles arise from a universal fermion field. (Others, however, took a highly skeptical view of this theory.) At one seminar Landau received a letter through Pontecorvo, supposedly from Pauli, and Landau read it aloud. In the brief letter, Pauli wrote that he liked Heisenberg's theory, that he'd found new arguments in its favor and found it highly plausible. Moreover, wrote Pauli, the latest experiments with Λ hyperons confirm Heisenberg's theory. No details were given about these experiments, though. There was great excitement: after all, Pauli was known as a person with a critical turn of mind, far from gullible. Different hypotheses were advanced; one young theorist even went up to the board and tried to imagine what the experiment could be that Pauli wrote of. Meanwhile, Migdal took the letter, read it carefully and said, "Something's strange here. If you read the first letters of all the lines from top to bottom, it spells the Russian word 'fools.' What could that mean?" The secret was simple: The letter was written by Migdal and Pontecorvo."

"Главное, делайте всё с увлечением, это страшно украшает жизнь."

"This work contains many things which are new and interesting. Unfortunately, everything that is new is not interesting, and everything which is interesting, is not new."

"A ruler that has but an army has one hand, but he who has a navy has both."

"Alas! I have civilized my own subjects; I have conquered other nations; yet I have not been able to civilize or to conquer myself."

"The history of the Romanovs is an Elizabethan tragedy that lasts for three centuries. Its keynote is cruelty, a barbaric, pointless kind of cruelty that has always been common in the East, but that came to Europe only recently, in the time of Hitler."

"Here is the model which I intend to follow for the whole of my reign."

"After Westphalia brought peace to Europe, the second half of the seventeenth century saw a further spread of resident ambassadors, with Louis XIV’s France leading the way, and French replaced Latin as the lingua franca. There was, however, still scope for summitry, for instance during Peter the Great’s tour of Western Europe in 1697–8. His meetings with William III of England helped bring Russia belatedly into the European diplomatic orbit. In due course, the czar created a “Diplomatic Chancellery” and a network of foreign embassies on the European model."

"He is thinner, taller, younger – more boyish-looking – than expected, but he is also the shyest and most nervous human being I have ever seen. He chews not merely his nails but his fingers, twitches his pouty mouth and chin, chain-smokes, wiggles his nose in constant adjustment of his spectacles, looks querulous one moment and ready to cry the next. His hands tremble, he stutters, his whole frame wobbles when he shakes hands…There is no betrayal of the thoughts behind those frightened, very intelligent eyes."

"Many consider that Shostakovich is the greatest 20th-century composer. In his 15 symphonies, 15 quartets, and in other works he demonstrated mastery of the largest and most challenging forms with music of great emotional power and technical invention…All his works are marked by emotional extremes – tragic intensity, grotesque and bizarre wit, humour, parody, and savage sarcasm."

"Part of the task, of course, is simply insisting that female experience is human experience and worthy of being explored in literature...as Shostakovich said (speaking of Yevtoshenko’s Babi Yar poem mourning the massacre of the Jews of Kiev during World War II, defying the official cover-up), “Art destroys silence.” To bring what is silenced into speech is to make a space."

"Neuhaus was sitting next to him at a performance…that was being badly conducted by Alexander Gauk. Neuhaus leaned over to whisper in Shostakovich’s ear: “Dmitry Dmitrievich, this is awful.” Whereupon Shostakovich turned to Neuhaus: “You’re right, Heinrich Gustavovich! It’s splendid! Quite remarkable!” Realising that he’d been misunderstood, Neuhaus repeated his earlier remark: “Yes,” muttered Shostakovich, “it’s awful, quite awful.” That was Shostakovich to the life."

"Pornophony."

"Not since the time of Berlioz has a symphonic composer created such a stir. In far-away America, great conductors vie with each other for the jus primae noctis of his music. The score of his Seventh Symphony, the symphony of struggle and victory, has been reduced to a roll of microfilm and flown half-way across the world...to speed the day of the American première. How the old romantics would have loved to be the center of such a fantastic adventure!"

"What you have in your head, put down on paper. The head is a fragile vessel."

"I write music, it's performed. It can be heard, and whoever wants to hear it will. After all, my music says it all. It doesn't need historical and hysterical commentaries. In the long run, any words about music are less important than the music."

"Here is music turned deliberately inside out in order that nothing will be reminiscent of classical opera, or have anything in common with symphonic music or with simple and popular musical language accessible to all...Here we have "leftist" confusion instead of natural human music. The power of good music to infect the masses has been sacrificed to a petty-bourgeois, "formalist" attempt to create originality through cheap clowning. It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly."

"He did not write about this war and that revolution, but about war and revolution in general, the state of mind and emotion, not facts."

"Jewish folk music has made a most powerful impression on me. I never tire of delighting in it, it's multifaceted, it can appear to be happy while it is tragic. It's almost always laughter through tears. This quality of Jewish folk music is close to my ideas of what music should be. There should always be two layers in music. Jews were tormented for so long that they learned to hide their despair. They express despair in dance music."

"The majority of my symphonies are tombstones."

"People knew about Babi Yar before Yevtushenko's poem, but they were silent. And when they read the poem, the silence was broken. Art destroys silence."

"The Allies enjoyed my music, as though trying to say: Look how we like Shostakovich's symphonies, and you still want something more from us, a second front or something."

"For some reason, people think that music must tell us only about the pinnacles of the human spirit, or at least about highly romantic villains. Most people are average, neither black nor white. They're gray. A dirty shade of gray. And it's in that vague gray middle ground that the fundamental conflicts of our age take place."

"I feel eternal pain for those who were killed by Hitler, but I feel no less pain for those killed on Stalin's orders. I suffer for everyone who was tortured, shot, or starved to death."

"When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something."

"The most uninteresting part of the biography of a composer is his childhood. All those preludes are the same and the reader hurries on to the fugue."

"What do you think of Puccini? [ Britten: "I think his operas are dreadful." ] No, Ben, you are wrong. He wrote marvellous operas, but dreadful music."

"It's about the people, who have stopped believing because the cup of evil has run over."