Russian Novels

"In every misfortune of one's neighbour there is something cheering for an onlooker - whoever he may be."

"Anyone is worthy of an umbrella(stavrogin). At one stroke you define the minimum of human rights(Lebyadkin)"

"One must really be a great man to be able to make a stand even against common sense."

"It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man's life is usually made up of nothing but the habits he has accumulated during the first half."

"France throughout her long history was only the incarnation and development of the Roman God, and if they have at last flung their Roman god into the abyss and plunged into atheism, which, for the time being, they call socialism, it is solely because socialism is, anyway healthier than Roman Catholicism."

"Reason never had the power to define good and evil."

"It's a sign of the decay of nations when they begin to have gods in common. When gods begin to be common to several nations the gods are dying and the faith in them, together with the nations themselves. The stronger a people the more individual their God."

"Horns and Hoofs ("Рога и копыта"), an ironical placeholder name for a business engaged in shady or dubious activity. A company with this name was established by Bender to make things look official."

"Sitz-Chairman (зиц-председатель, zits-predsedatel), a strawman chairman. The Horns and Hoofs was headed by Sitz-Chairman Funt. The title is a bilingual Russian-Yiddish pun. The Yiddish word "sitzen" means "to sit", which in Russian connotes "doing time". Also "Sitz" has legal meanings similar to the English "seat". The sole function of a Sitz-Chairman was to do prison time when (not "if"!) the time comes (Compare Sitz-redakteur, a person hired by a 19th century German newspaper for the same purpose). One notable modern usage: "Зицпредседатель" is the Russian title for the film The Hudsucker Proxy."

"Cold soft-boiled eggs are a very tasteless food, and a good, cheerful person would never eat it. But Alexander Ivanovich did not eat, he fed. He did not have breakfast, but carried out the physiological process of introducing the required amount of fats, carbohydrates and vitamins into his body."

"We don't need any louds around here. We're louds ourselves."

"You provide the gasoline, we'll provide the ideas."

"I honor the Criminal Code. It's my weakness."

"Oh, you thought. So you think sometimes, is that it? You're a thinker. What's your name, Great Thinker? Spinoza? Jean-Jacques Rousseau? Marcus Aurelius?"

"Pedestrians just need to be loved. Pedestrians comprise the larger part of humanity. More than that: its better part."

"This is a clipping from the Little Soviet Encyclopedia. Listen to what it says here about Rio de Janeiro: ‘Population one million three hundred and sixty thousand… So.… ‘a considerable number of mulattoes… at the large bay in the Atlantic Ocean…’ Here, here!… ‘in the wealth of stores and the grandeur of buildings its main streets rival those of the largest cities of the world.’ Can you imagine that? Rival! Mulattoes, bay, export coffee! In other words, coffee dumping. A Charleston entitled ‘My Girl Has a Little Thing,’ and… But what’s the use of talking? You can see for yourself what’s going on. One and a half million people, and all of them to a man in white trousers. I want to go away from here. In the course of the last year grave differences have developed between the Soviet government and me."

"Materialization of spirits and Free elephants ("Материализация духов и раздача слонов")."

"No, this is not Rio de Janeiro. ("Нет, это не Рио-де-Жанейро"). Used to describe anything that isn't quite all it's cracked up to be. In the book, it is Ostap Bender's hint to his dream to get rich and move to Rio de Janeiro, to walk in white pants under the bright sun."

"Now I will have to become a building superintendent! ("Придется переквалифицироваться в управдомы" - the last line of the book). Spoken after one's dreams have been crushed and harsh reality is setting in."

"Keep on sawing, Shura, keep on sawing! ("Пилите, Шура, пилите!"). This ironic phrase refers to an enterprise which is about to fail, especially when continued effort only serves to postpone the inevitable moment of disaster and punishment - a situation known as "death march" in software development. In the novel, two hapless crooks stole kettlebells thinking they had gold cores. The original text in the book omits "Shura", but popular versions usually add the name as above, or alternatively: Keep on sawing, Shura, it is surely golden!"

"An automobile is not a luxury, but a means of transportation ("Автомобиль — не роскошь, а средство передвижения"). The phrase, reminiscent of Soviet style propaganda, saw some usage within the Eastern Bloc. More recently (circa 1989), Mircea Dinescu opined, A wife is not a luxury, but a means of transportation (referring to people who took Western spouses in order to emigrate)."

"Beer is served only to members of the trade union ("Пиво отпускается только членам профсоюза"), an enduring parody of the Soviet system of privileges."

"Children of Lt. Schmidt (Дети лейтенанта Шмидта), a term for small-time con artists. In the book, it was found that there are thirty men and four women impersonating the offspring of Pyotr Schmidt, in order to get money from the government."

"Twenty-five years after Lolita's publication, as Edward Albee's dramatic adaptation prepares to open on Broadway, Nabokov's vision of American childhood seems nothing if not prescient. The public of 1956 was outraged not only by the thought of early sex but also by the image of a child so knowing, jaded and unchildlike. How much more familiar Lolita is today. There is no doubt that 9-, 10-, 11- and 12-year-olds of the 1980's have more in common with Lolita, at least in what they know, than with those guileless and innocent creatures in their shiny Mary Janes and pigtails, their scraped knees and trusting ways that were called children not so long ago."

"Some say the Great American Novel is Huckleberry Finn, some say it's The Jungle, some say it's The Great Gatsby. But my vote goes to the tale with the maximum lust, hypocrisy and obsession — the view of America that could only have come from an outsider — Nabokov's Lolita. ... Those who bought "Lolita" looking for mere prurient kicks must surely have been disappointed. Lolita is dark and twisted all right, but it's also a corruptly beautiful love story of two tragically alike, id-driven souls... What makes Lolita a work of greatness isn't that its title has become ingrained in the vernacular, isn't that it was a generation ahead of America in fetishizing young girls. No, it is the writing, the way Nabokov bounces around in words like the English language is a toy trunk, the sly wit, the way it's devastating and cynical and heartbreaking all at once. Poor old Dolly Haze might not have grown up very well, but Lolita forever remains a thing of timeless beauty."

"At one point a heated discussion arose over the possible interpretation of Lolita as a grandiose metaphor of the classic European's hopeless love for young, seductive, barbaric America. In his afterword to the novel Nabokov himself mentions this as the naive theory of one of the publishers who turned the book down. And although there can't be the slightest doubt that Nabokov did not mean to limit Lolita to that interpretation, there is no reason to exclude it as one of the novel's many dimensions. The point, I felt, became obvious when one drew the line between Lolita as a delightfully frivolous story on the verge of pornography and Lolita as a literary masterpiece, the only convincing love story of our century."

"Lolita is a fine book, a distinguished book — all right then — a great book."

"Lolita is one of our finest American novels, a triumph of style and vision, an unforgettable work, Nabokov's best (though not most characteristic) work, a wedding of Swiftian satirical vigor with the kind of minute, loving patience that belongs to a man infatuated with the visual mysteries of the world."

"I would say that of all my books Lolita has left me with the most pleasurable afterglow—perhaps because it is the purest of all, the most abstract and carefully contrived. I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don't seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings."

"No, I shall never regret Lolita. She was like the composition of a beautiful puzzle—its composition and its solution at the same time, since one is a mirror view of the other, depending on the way you look. Of course she completely eclipsed my other works—at least those I wrote in English: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, my short stories, my book of recollections; but I cannot grudge her this. There is a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet."

"Lolita is a special favorite of mine. It was my most difficult book—the book that treated of a theme which was so distant, so remote, from my own emotional life that it gave me a special pleasure to use my combinational talent to make it real."

"Lolita is pornography, and we do not plan to review it."

"All of Nabokov's books are about tyranny, even Lolita. Perhaps Lolita most of all."

"For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss."

"As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage."

"Although everybody should know that I detest symbols and allegories (which is due partly to my old feud with Freudian voodooism and partly to my loathing of generalizations devised by literary mythists and sociologists), an otherwise intelligent reader who flipped through the first part described Lolita as "Old Europe debauching young America," while another flipper saw in it "Young America debauching old Europe.""

"My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English."

"After Olympia Press, in Paris, published the book, an American critic suggested that Lolita was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution "English language" for "romantic novel" would make this elegant formula more correct."

"The following decision I make with all the legal impact and support of a signed testament: I wish this memoir to be published only when Lolita is no longer alive. Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita."

"All of a sudden I noticed that he had noticed that I did not seem to have noticed Chum protruding from beneath the other corner of the chest. We fell to wrestling again. We rolled all over the floor, in each other's arms, like two huge helpless children. He was naked and goatish under his robe, and I felt suffocated as he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us."

"In Kasbeam a very old barber gave me a very mediocre haircut: he babbled of a baseball-playing son of his, and, at every explodent, spat into my neck, and every now and then wiped his glasses on my sheet-wrap, or interrupted his tremulous scissor work to produce faded newspaper clippings, and so inattentive was I that it came as a shock to realize as he pointed to an easelled photograph among the ancient gray lotions, that the moustached young ball player had been dead for the last thirty years."

"Dying, dying, Lolita Haze, Of hate and remorse, I'm dying. And again my hairy fist I raise, And again I hear you crying."

"Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze. Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet. Age: five thousand three hundred days. Profession: none, or "starlet"."

"I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all."

"Her brown rose tasted of blood."

"And so we rolled East, I more devastated than braced with the satisfaction of my passion, and she glowing with health, her bi-iliac garland still as brief as a lad's, although she had added two inches to her stature and eight pounds to her weight. We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night — every night, every night — the moment I feigned sleep."

"Lolita, when she chose, could be a most exasperating brat. I was not really quite prepared for her fits of disorganized boredom, intense and vehement griping, her sprawling, droopy, dopey-eyed style, and what is called goofing off — a kind of diffused clowning which she thought was tough in a boyish hoodlum way. Mentally, I found her to be a disgustingly conventional little girl. Sweet hot jazz, square dancing, gooey fudge sundaes, musicals, movie magazines and so forth — these were the obvious items in her list of beloved things. The Lord knows how many nickels I fed to the gorgeous music boxes that came with every meal we had."

"While eager to impress me with the world of tough kids, she was not quite prepared for certain discrepancies between a kid's life and mine. Pride alone prevented her from giving up; for, in my strange predicament, I feigned supreme stupidity and had her have her way — at least while I could still bear it. But really these are irrelevant matters; I am not concerned with so-called "sex" at all. Anybody can imagine those elements of animality. A greater endeavor lures me on: to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets."

"Then she crept into my waiting arms, radiant, relaxed, caressing me with her tender, mysterious, impure, indifferent, twilight eyes--for all the world, like the cheapest of cheap cuties. For that is what nymphets imitate--while we moan and die."

"All I want to stress is that my discovery of her was a fatal consequence of that 'princedom by the sea' in my tortured past. Everything between the two events was but a series of gropings and blunders, and false rudiments of joy."