Satirists From Russia

"She moved nearer, leaned her shoulder against me- and we were one, and something flowed from her into me, and I knew: this is how it must be. I knew it with every nerve, and every hair, and every heartbeat, so sweet it verged on pain. And what joy to submit to this "must." A piece of iron must feel such joy as it submits to the precise, inevitable law that draws it to a magnet. Or a stone, thrown up, hesitating for a moment, then plunging headlong back to earth. Or a man, after the final agony, taking a last deep breath — and dying."

"The law of revolution is red, fiery, deadly; but this death means the birth of new life, a new star. And the law of entropy is cold, ice blue, like the icy interplanetary infinities. The flame turns from red to an even, warm pink, no longer deadly, but comfortable. The sun ages into a planet, convenient for highways, stores, beds, prostitutes, prisons: this is the law. And if the planet is to be kindled into youth again, it must be set on fire, it must be thrown off the smooth highway of evolution: this is the law. The flame will cool tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow (in the Book of Genesis days are equal to years, ages). But someone must see this already today, and speak heretically today about tomorrow. Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought."

"At night numbers must sleep; it is their duty, just as it is their duty to work in the daytime. Not sleeping at night is a criminal offense."

"Every today is at the same time both a cradle and a shroud: a shroud for yesterday, a cradle for tomorrow. Today, yesterday, and tomorrow are equally near to one another, and equally far. They are generations, they are grandfathers, fathers, and grandsons. And grandsons invariably love and hate the fathers; the fathers invariably hate and love the grandfathers. Today is doomed to die — because yesterday died, and because tomorrow will be born. Such is the wise and cruel law. Cruel, because it condemns to eternal dissatisfaction those who already today see the distant peaks of tomorrow; wise, because eternal dissatisfaction is the only pledge of eternal movement forward, eternal creation. He who has found his ideal today is, like Lot's wife, already turned to a pillar of salt, has already sunk into the earth and does not move ahead. The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy: tomorrow is an inevitable heresy of today, which has turned into a pillar of salt, and to yesterday, which has scattered to dust. Today denies yesterday, but is a denial of denial tomorrow. This is the constant dialectic path which in a grandiose parabola sweeps the world into infinity. Yesterday, the thesis; today, the antithesis, and tomorrow, the synthesis."

"True literature can exist only when it is created, not by diligent and reliable officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics."

"Yesterday, there was a tsar, and there were slaves; today there is no tsar, but the slaves remain; tomorrow there will be only tsars. We march in the name of tomorrow's free man — the royal man. We have lived through the epoch of suppression of the masses; we are living in an epoch of suppression of the individual in the name of the masses; tomorrow will bring the liberation of the individual — in the name of man. Wars, imperialist and civil, have turned man into material for warfare, into a number, a cipher. Man is forgotten, for the sake of the sabbath. We want to recall something else to mind: that the sabbath is for man. The only weapon worthy of man — of tomorrows's man — is the word."

"Knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith."

"If there were anything fixed in nature, if there were truths, all of this would, of course, be wrong. But fortunately, all truths are erroneous. This is the very essence of the dialectical process: today's truths become errors tomorrow; there is no final number. This truth (the only one) is for the strong alone. Weak-nerved minds insist on a finite universe, a last number; they need, in Nietzsche's words, "the crutches of certainty." The weak-nerved lack the strength to include themselves in the dialectic syllogism."

"When the flaming, seething sphere (in science, religion, social life, art) cools, the fiery magma becomes coated with dogma—a rigid, ossified, motionless crust. Dogmatization in science, religion, social life, or art is the entropy of thought. What has become dogma no longer burns; it only gives off warmth — it is tepid, it is cool. Instead of the Sermon on the Mount, under the scorching sun, to up-raised arms and sobbing people, there is drowsy prayer in a magnificent abbey. Instead of Galileo's "But still, it turns!" there are dispassionate computations in a well-heated room in an observatory. On the Galileos, the epigones build their own structures, slowly, bit by bit, like corals. This is the path of evolution — until a new heresy explodes the crush of dogma and all the edifices of the most enduring stone which have been raised upon it. Explosions are not very comfortable. And therefore the exploders, the heretics, are justly exterminated by fire, by axes, by words. To every today, to every evolution, to the laborious, slow, useful, most useful, creative, coral-building work, heretics are a threat. Stupidly, recklessly, they burst into today from tomorrow; they are romantics."

"Fog.. So very.." "Do you like fog" She used the ancient, long-forgotten "thou" — the "thou" of the master to the slave. It entered into me slowly, sharply. Yes, I was a slave, and this, too, was necessary, was good. "Yes, good.." I said aloud to myself. And then to her," I hate fog. I am afraid of it." "That means you love it. You are afraid of it because it is stronger than you; you hate it because you are afraid of it: you love it because you cannot subdue it to your will. Only the unsubduable can be loved."

"Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative."

"The ideology in the present case is eager to give itself the air of science. p. 289"

"The individual is today capable of carrying out an ideological treatment on information received, the effects of which are assured. Science is ultimately content to provide the phraseology, ideas and themes. p. 288"

"Communism was so organic for Russia and had so powerfully entered the way of life and psychology of Russians that the destruction of communism was equivalent to the destruction of Russia and of the Russian people as a historic people. [...] In a word, they [the anti-communists] aimed at communism but killed Russia."

"It is impossible to refute an ideology. We can only weaken or strengthen it depending on whether we weaken or strengthen its influence on people. p. 286"

"Understanding scientific texts requires a long period of specialized preparation and the use of a particular, professional language. Science is aimed at a restricted circle of specialists. Ideological texts are addressed to an entire population, regardless of profession and differences in educational level. To “understand” them (or more precisely to assimilate them), there is no need to undergo special preparation. It is enough to refer to examples from daily life to clarify this or that obscure passage. p. 286"

"Biotechnology is likely to play a role in reducing the world's population, eliminating unwanted peoples, etc. But no matter what we invent, the heart of society will remain the natural man with a human body and a human intellect."

"After the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, a massive attack on the social rights of citizens was launched in the West. Today the socialists who are in power in most European countries are pursuing policies of dismantling the social security system, destroying everything that was socialist in the capitalist countries. There is no longer a political force in the West capable of protecting ordinary citizens. The existence of political parties is a mere formality. They will differ less and less as time goes on. The war in the Balkans was anything but democratic. Nevertheless, the war was perpetrated by the socialists who historically have been against these kinds of ventures. Environmentalists, who are in power in some countries, welcomed the environmental catastrophe caused by the NATO bombings. They even dared to claim that bombs containing depleted uranium are not dangerous for the environment, even though soldiers loading them wear special protective overalls. Thus, democracy is gradually disappearing from the social structure of the West. Totalitarianism is spreading everywhere because the supranational structure imposes its laws on individual states. This undemocratic superstructure gives orders, imposes sanctions, organizes embargos, drops bombs, causes hunger. Even Clinton obeys it. Financial totalitarianism has subjugated political power. Emotions and compassion are alien to cold financial totalitarianism. Compared with financial dictatorship, political dictatorship is humane. Resistance was possible inside the most brutal dictatorships. Rebellion against banks is impossible."

"Science presupposes the use of thoughtful, precise terminology, which leaves no room for ambiguity. Ideology, on the contrary, presupposes the use of meaningless, vague, equivocal terms. Scientific terminology does not need to be analyzed or interpreted. Ideological phraseology must be commented on, compared, rethought. Scientific assertions assume that we can at any time confirm them, refute them, or even in extreme cases, recognize their insoluble nature. The absurdity of ideological propositions means that they can neither be refuted nor confirmed p. 285"

"The petty-bourgeois mind considers the lives of others as if it were in their situation, transposing onto them its attitude, its criteria of judgment, its feelings. p. 37"

"...Social laws are immutable. You can destroy a nation, but you cannot destroy the laws by which nations are formed and exist. If the West faces a real threat to its existence, it will not stop at reducing the world's population. I'm pretty sure AIDS, SARS, etc. are all man-made viruses. And I am absolutely certain that in the decades to come, the United States will see China break up into dozens of states. This is all the more inevitable since a billion and a half Chinese are violating the biosociological optimum of humanity."

"This way that petty-bourgeois minds confuse their subjective assessments with the objective situation goes so far that the majority of notions used in conversations about social problems have currently lost their scientific character to become simple expressions of estimation. . p. 37"

"It has frequently happened to me to come up against conclusions which, although made by educated people, were no less monstrous in their absurdity. p. 36"

"Western society is undemocratic, totalitarian in its very essence - at the level of production cells. And that is why it is democratic in its superstructure, in its ideology. There is a sort of law of constancy of the sum of democracy and totalitarianism."

"A western citizen is being brainwashed much more than a soviet citizen ever was during the era of communist propaganda. In ideology, the main thing is not the ideas, but rather the mechanisms of their distribution. The might of the Western media, for example, is incomparably greater than that of the propaganda mechanisms of the Vatican when it was at the zenith of its power. And it is not only the cinema, literature, philosophy – all the levers of influence and mechanisms used in the promulgation of culture, in its broadest sense, work in this direction. At the slightest impulse all who work in this area respond with such consistency that it is hard not to think that all orders come from a single source of power."

"The S-F is a very powerful, very modern tool, [...]. p. 143"

"The petty bourgeois is inclined to pass off what he feels as the truth. p. 36"

"Petty-bourgeois thought claims to see its results directly confirmed by observable facts. Scientific thought, on the contrary, knows that its results do not directly coincide with observable facts. They only provide means by which concrete facts can be explained and predicted. p. 35-36"

"The effectiveness of the Westernist economy is conditioned by three laws: the rational organization of business; brutal work discipline; maximum use of the means of production and labor force."

"The man who thinks like a scientist seeks not only to note the facts, but also to analyze them taking into account their chance or their necessity, he tries to analyze the laws that immediate observation does not discern and to 'eliminate the influence of one's own inclinations on the results of one's reflections. 35"

"The man who thinks like a petty bourgeois notices directly observable facts and immediately draws hasty generalizations without the slightest analysis. His judgments are subjective, that is, they bear the mark of his personal inclinations. p. 35"

"I argued from the beginning that in the socio-political sphere, Westernism seeks to strengthen the non-democratic aspect of the system of power and administration, to strengthen the role of the state, to introduce non-democratic elements into the system of power and to make democracy a means of manipulating the masses and a camouflage for the totalitarian aspect."

"The disease of our time is mediocrity."

"From a petty bourgeois point of view something normal and natural is "something" good. this type of thinking makes no difference between the subjective appreciation of phenomena and their objective qualities. p. 35"

"In the present case the man who reasons as a historian is only a petty bourgeois in disguise. p. 42"

"The intellectual level of Westerners has never been very high. This is still the case today: you don't have to be intelligent to have power. Westerners create computer models, but they don't have scientific models."

"Historical consciousness is condemned, for its part, to take everything at face value; she sees the origin of communist society in the action of supporters of communist doctrine and links the development of opposing forces to the action of its enemies. She is, for example, incapable of understanding that without the help of representatives of the privileged strata of the old Russian society the new society would not have been able to last a year. p. 41"

"Millions of people participated in the historical process that gave birth to the communist society of the Soviet Union. These people have performed billions of different actions. They accomplished them in their own interest. They acted according to the laws of community conduct and not only according to the laws of history, which do not intervene in the conduct of individuals. Some of these actions worked in favor of the new society, the other against. Sometimes the same actions worked either in favor of this society or against it. The supporters of the new societies have not always necessarily acted for it, and conversely its adversaries have not always harmed it. The revolutionaries have done a lot against the revolution and the counter-revolutionaries a lot in its favor, without realizing it. p. 41"

"F.B._ What is your relationship with Alexander Solzhenitsyn? A.Z. _ I've never had one and I don't want to have one. As a writer, his "work" is mediocre, overvalued. And as a thinker, it's close to nullity. I am looking to the future, and Solzhenitsyn, to the past."

"Others question the real facts and make mistakes. For my part, I am ignorant of this side of reality and I am hardly wrong. There are several ways to find the truth of things: for me, it's always in my head and in my heart."

"I address every man, my writings seek to reach what is human in every living being. p. 143"

"There is a sociological law according to which systems which have contact end up looking alike... p. 138 and 144"

"The first words of the inhabitats of Partgrad were offensive words."

"When Andropov became First Secretary of Central Committee of CPSU, he ordered the town renamed Partgrad. It’s hard to guess, how long will that name endure."

"On the palace of the Prince, there was a slogan: ‘Long live feudalism – the bright future of the whole humanity!’ The slogan on the first sanctuary read: ‘Forward to the victory of serfdom!’"

"It was prince Igor who decided already many years before Peter the Great to cut an opening to Europe. But as he didn’t know where Europe was, he cut it in a wrong direction, namely to Asia."

"The Stalin Square and Stalin Prospect were renamed Lenin Square and Lenin Prospect. The statue of Stalin was remade into statue of Lenin."

"The oblast head of Church disproved the claim in a party newspaper. At the same time he condemned the president of the US as a warmonger."

"Having taken advantage of the carelessness of the KGB, the true communist ran to Moscow, with the intention of announcing the Western journalists that communism in Partgrad is being built in a wrong way and to begging the Western leaders to exert pressure on Soviet leadership so that the latter would rectify the Soviet communism and he, a true communist would be taken back in the party."

"Historical judgment focuses attention on phenomena from which we must above all abstract ourselves if we want to understand what this new society born in a given historical context really is. The historical process is also, of course, a reality, but it is a reality which disappears into the past. The new society which has matured within him quickly got rid of a historical covering which encumbered it and had become foreign to him. It constitutes another historical environment more in keeping with its nature. Sociological reality is designed to remain. She is looking to the future. p. 41"