authors-from-russia

"Western European humanity moves by will and reason. A Russian person lives first of all with his heart and imagination, and only then with his will and mind. Therefore, the average European is ashamed of sincerity, conscience and kindness [regarding it] as "stupidity"; A Russian person, on the contrary, expects from a person, first of all, kindness, conscience and sincerity. Original: Западноевропейское человечество движется волею и рассудком. Русский человек живет прежде всего сердцем и воображением и лишь потом волею и умом. Поэтому средний европеец стыдится искренности, совести и доброты как «глупости»; русский человек, наоборот, ждет от человека прежде всего доброты, совести и искренности."

"Ukraine is recognized as the most threatened part of Russia in terms of secession and conquest. Ukrainian separatism is an artificial phenomenon, devoid of real grounds. It arose from the ambition of the leaders and the international intrigue of conquest. Little Russians are a branch of a single, Slavic-Russian people. This branch has no reason to be at enmity with other branches of the same people and to separate into a separate state. Having seceded, this state betrays itself to be conquered and plundered by foreigners. Little Russia and Great Russia are bound together by faith, tribe, historical fate, geographical location, economy, culture and politics. The foreigners who are preparing the dismemberment must remember that they are declaring by this to the whole of Russia a centuries-old struggle. There will be no peace and no economic prosperity under such a dismemberment. Russia will turn into a source of civil and international wars for centuries. The dismembering power will become the most hated of the enemies of national Russia. In the struggle against it, all alliances and all means will be used. Russia will shift its center to the Urals, gather all its huge forces, develop its technology, find powerful allies for itself and fight until it completely and forever undermines the power of the dismembering power. National Russia is not looking for anyone's death, but it will be able to respond in time to any attempt at dismemberment and will fight to the end. It is more profitable for any power to have Russia as a friend, not an enemy. History hasn't said its last word yet..."

"How did it happen? We saw it come about in front of our very eyes. All intermediate social links, such as the family, one's circle of friends, class, society itself-each abruptly disappeared, leaving every one of us to stand alone before the mysterious force embodied in the State, with its powers of life and death. In ordinary parlance, this was summed up in the word "Lubianka" (Footnote: "Headquarters of the secret police, and political prison in Moscow.") If what we have seen in this country is only a process taking place throughout Europe, then it must be said that we have demonstrated the sickness of the age in a form so acute and unadulterated as to merit special study in any search for the prevention and cure of it. In an age when the main cry is "Every man for himself," the personality is doomed. Personality is dependent on the world at large, on one's neighbors. It defines itself by reference to others and becomes aware of its own uniqueness only when it sees the uniqueness of everyone else."

"man must answer for everything, particularly for his own soul."

"Why were they all so eager for fame? Surely nothing was ever less worth thinking about. (p 427)"

"whatever his quality, the reader is the final arbiter, and it is for him that I kept M.'s poetry and it is to him that I have handed it over. And now, in this long period we are presently living through, a curious process is taking place: people casually leaf through a volume of poetry and, scarcely aware of what is happening, gradually soak it in, until it stirs their numbed and dormant spirits, waking them up and itself coming to life again as it revivifies those it touches. It is a process of diffusion, of interpenetration, by which at least some people are brought back to their senses and given the strength to shake off their accursed inertia. I do not know how it is elsewhere, but here, in this country, poetry is a healing, life-giving thing, and people have not lost the gift of being able to drink of its inner strength. People can be killed for poetry here-a sign of unparalleled respect-because they are still capable of living by it."

"I never ceased to believe in M.'s and Akhmatova's poetry. In our depersonalized world where everything human was silenced, only the poet preserved his "self" and a voice which can still be heard even now."

"I am even now constantly tormented by the thought of those years of life we were not allowed to live. I am always wondering what they would have been like if we had not been cheated of them. (28: Stages in My Life)"

"it is not just the frequency with which "I" occurs, but the general spirit of a person's work that shows to what extent he is afflicted by the besetting sin of "egotism." And anyway, wasn't it something of a feat to keep a grip on one's own personality and a true sense of identity in our era of wholesale slaughter and death camps on such a vast scale? Times such as these breed only individualism based on the principle "every man for himself," not a true sense of one's own worth. The loss of this sense is not something our age can be proud of, but a sign of its sickness. I know the symptoms from observing myself and those around me."

"The great mass of people thus prefer to glide over the surface of reality, always shirking the effort of trying to understand it."

"pain acts like a leaven for both word and thought, quickening your sense of reality and the true logic of this world. Without pain you cannot distinguish the creative element that builds and sustains life from its opposite-the forces of death and destruction which are always for some reason very seductive, seeming at first sight to be logically plausible, and perhaps even irresistible."

"Looking back on it, you may feel the path you have traveled was predetermined, but all along the way there were thousands of turnings and crossroads at which you could have chosen a completely different route. What we do with our lives is to some extent socially conditioned, since we all live at a particular moment in history, but the realm of inevitability is confined to our historical coordinates-beyond them everything depends on us. Freedom is boundless, and even the personality, one's own "self," is not something "given" once and for all; rather it takes shape in the course of one's life, depending to a large extent on the path one has chosen."

"How can I forget when our life together was cut short literally in midsentence? The words never said are like a lump in my throat, and the thought of them torments me. (28: Stages in My Life)"

"Now again we are not supposed to remember the past and think-let alone speak about it. (42: Last Letter)"

"when her husband is taken away, a woman turns to stone, into an automaton, into I don't know what, the frozen expression I must have had during those last minutes I have seen only on the faces of other women whose husbands had been arrested. (28: Stages in My Life)"

"It is true that "forced labor" is too mild a term for the camps of the twentieth century and that nobody in the world would actually want to go into a camp or gas chamber."

"Nationalism, like the ideas of Leo Tolstoi, is an attempt to stop the course of history. Everything leading to separation is the result of license: it smashes what is whole, breaks and pulverizes it into tiny fragments that can never be joined together again. The truth of this has become completely apparent in our century. We have been witness to the process of disintegration. What has it brought us, apart from material and spiritual impoverishment?"

"People like myself were the lucky ones who had not gone to prison. Knowing what it was like to live in "freedom," I was always thinking of those who were behind barbed wire. This was why I could not think about myself, but only about all the others-those who had gone away and would never return, those who still nourished hopes of coming back but would never live to see the day. Every time I heard rumors of new arrests, it was like salt in my own fresh wounds. In the midst of such general misery and doom, the word "I" lost its meaning, becoming shameful or taboo. Who dared talk about his own fate or complain about it when it was the same for everybody?"

"I am now faced with a new task, and am not quite sure how to go about it. Earlier it was all so simple: my job was to preserve M.'s verse and tell the story of what happened to us. The events concerned were outside our control. Like any other wife of a prisoner, like any other stopiatnitsa or exiled person, I thought only about the times I lived in, racking my brains over the question: How could this happen, how had we come to such a pass? Thinking about this, I forgot myself and what had happened to me personally, and even that I was writing about my own life, not somebody else's. The fact is that there was nothing exceptional about my case. There were untold numbers of women like myself roaming the country-mute, cowed creatures, some with children, some without, timidly trying to do their work as best they could and constantly "improving their qualifications," which meant joining study groups to sweat year in, year out, over the "Fourth Chapter," (Footnote: "The chapter on Dialectical Materialism written by Stalin in The History of the C.P.S.U.: Short Course (1938).") including the story of how the ape turned into Homo sapiens by learning to distinguish left from right. (This development was aided to some extent by food rich in vitamins and protein-more than we could say of ours.) But at least we had our work, and we clung to it frantically, knowing that without it all was lost..."

"The man governed by license is prepared to destroy everything and everybody that stands in his way-himself first and foremost. Destruction and self-destruction are the inevitable consequences of license. The suicide of Hitler and his holocaust is the supreme example of self-destruction as the final stage of license. Hitler believed that the whole of Germany would gather around the fire he had lighted. I have read that he spent his last days issuing a constant stream of orders to armies that no longer existed or had disintegrated. He was indignant at these vanished armies for failing to carry out his instructions. His behavior is an excellent illustration of Sergei Bulgakov's observation that license always leads to loss of touch with reality. Bulgakov understood this at a time when license had still not taken on the extreme forms we have seen in our days."

"poetry is an elusive thing that can neither be hidden nor locked away."

"Nowadays the average reader doesn't even look for new ideas-he is suspicious of them. For too long now he has been hoodwinked, palmed off with bogus ideas masquerading as genuine ones. Still unable to figure all this out, he is drawn to the other extreme, to anything beyond the bounds of his primitive reasoning process."

"Let me read you something: "Poetry does indeed have a very special place in this country. It arouses people and shapes their minds. No wonder the birth of our new intelligensia is accompanied by a craving for poetry never seen before. It's the golden treasury in which our values are preserved. It brings people back to life, awakens their conscience and stirs them to thought. Why this should happen I do not know, but it's a fact." That's from Hope Against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelstam and she is writing of the Soviet Union. One could say this about our country, when one tries to conjecture why young blacks are writing poetry now. And one has to think then what a really marvellously tough thing the urge to write is. People find a way."

"In such times as these it is easy to lose hope. Nadezhda Mandelstam, whose husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, died in 1938 in a "transit camp" at Vladivostok, wrote a book about their life of unspeakable suffering under Stalin. This book she called Hope Against Hope. After his death she wrote a second book, and wished it to be called in English Hope Abandoned. In South Africa we are still writing the first book. We trust that we shall never have to write the second."

"…this may be the time to say one or two things to the person responsible for my present condition. You may succeed in silencing me but that silence comes at a price. You have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics have claimed. You have shown yourself to have no respect for life, liberty or any civilised value. You have shown yourself to be unworthy of your office, to be unworthy of the trust of civilised men and women. You may succeed in silencing one man but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life. May God forgive you for what you have done, not only to me but to beloved Russia and its people."

"...We should try to link our personal lives with the cause for which we struggle, with the cause of building communism...This, of course, does not mean that we should renounce our personal life. The Party of communism is not a sect, and so such asceticism should not be advocated. At a factory, I once heard a woman addressing her work-mates say: "Comrades working women, you should remember that once you join the Party you have to give up husband and children." Of course, this is not the approach to the question. It is not a matter of neglecting husband and children, but of training the children to become fighters for communism, to arrange things so that the husband becomes such a fighter, too. One has to know how to merge one's life with the life of society. This is not asceticism. On the contrary, the fact of this merging, the fact that the common cause of all working people becomes a personal matter, makes personal life richer. It does not become poorer, it offers deep and colourful experiences which humdrum family life has never provided. To know how to merge one's life with work for communism, with the work and struggle of the working people to build communism, is one of the tasks that face us. You, young people, are only just starting out on your lives, and you can build them so that there is no gap between your personal life and that of society..."

"...The woman today is not simply a man's wife, she is a social worker, she wants to educate her children in the new way, she wants her whole day-to-day life to be rearranged of new lines. At every step she feels she lacks knowledge."

"The girls must not be tied down to the home, but from the early years should be accustomed to being together, in one organisation with the boys—to be with them on a comradely footing."

"It was a great privilege to work so closely with these wonderful women of our movement...One of the greatest privileges of all was meeting Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, one of the most selflessly devoted human beings I have ever known. She always worked closely with Lenin, helping him in all his problems, and was technical secretary of the Party's Central Committee during their days of exile, a task which involved the handling of voluminous correspondence under conspiratorial conditions, and the most exacting labor with codes. Originally a teacher, her greatest interest was always in education, and her early work in the revolutionary movement had been organizing workers' study circles. As Vice Commissar of Education, she was in charge of adult education in the U.S.S.R. She told me of the immense problem of overcoming the illiteracy inherited from the tsarist regime. On my later visits she always sent for me to ask me for ideas from America which might be useful to the Soviet educational system."

"He who looks with indifference on life all round him "from the writer's carriage window" will never become a real writer...There is often a great deal of snobbish conceit in budding writers--and even frequently in workers' children, but [it] has to be thoroughly washed away."

"Not everyone can learn from life, from other people."

"The bourgeoisie of all countries understands to a nicety what a great power the experiences of childhood have over people, and for this reason it endeavours to bring the children up in the bourgeois spirit from their earliest years. The clergy, the teachers servile to the bourgeois Government, the unprincipled penny-a-line children’s authors and the grasping cinema proprietors all work feverishly in this direction."

"Что наша жизнь? Роман. — Кто автор? Аноним. Читаем по складам — смеемся, плачем — спим."

"“Liza,” she said, “how perfect are the works of the creation. I have passed upwards of sixty years in admiration of the blessings of providence, and I still find new causes for our gratitude.”"

"True happiness can only be found in the paths of virtue."

"There is a critical moment in the calendar of love, and its power is infinite."

"The wonders of the creation may be described, but the springs of the heart operate in the heart alone."

"Those pedagogues were not then in existence, and secondly, the Russians in general knew little about books. They brought up their children as nature rears her plants."

"There are many busy-bodies in the world, always worrying, always rushing back and forth; every one wonders at them. They seem ready to jump out of their own skins; but in spite of it all, they make no more progress than does the Squirrel in his wheel."

"We are the Roots of the tree on which you flourish. Go on rejoicing in your beauty! But remember there is this difference between us that with every autumn the old Leaves die, and with every spring new Leaves are born; but if the Roots once perish neither you nor the tree can live at all.""

"It is only when our consciences become tangled that the truth begins to hurt."

"How difficult it is to recognize spiritual illness in a person close to you, especially if the habit of years has established that person's power and authority. Had I realized that my mother was ill, my whole attitude toward her would have been different. But people far more experienced than I were equally blind. With every day Mother grew more nervous. Everything irritated her, made her weep, have hysterics, outbursts of temper."

"Masha died quietly, conscious to the last. Father and Kolya were sitting by her bed. They raised her on her pillow. An hour before she died she opened her eyes wide, saw Father and laid his hand on her breast. Father leaned over her and raised her thin, transparent hand to his lips. “I am dying,” she whispered almost inaudibly."

"The youngest daughter, Alexandra, was getting older. Dedicating herself completely to her father, she was an effective moral support and helper in his writing labors. She even learned stenography."

"Seryozha was different from all the other Tolstoys because of his great shyness and reserve. He often concealed his emotions, his outbursts of tenderness or passion, under a cloak of deliberate rudeness, or brusqueness. The most serious-minded and industrious of all the Tolstoy brothers, he had his own separate existence; he did not lean toward either his mother, or his father, and he rarely confided his thoughts to the members of his family. It was only when he sat down to the piano and for hours played his beloved Chopin, Beethoven, Bach, Grieg, or attempted to compose something himself, that everyone listened to him."

"There was one characteristic which Tolstoy kept until late in life—a childlike, spontaneous gaiety, an unaffected, almost passionate enthusiasm for sports, games, all sorts of pastimes. “A game is a serious matter”—this was a saying of Tatiana A. Behrs-Kuzminskaya which Tolstoy loved to repeat. When he was playing, wrestling, hunting, chasing his children, he did it in earnest, he threw himself into it with all his being and enjoyed it as much as his children. The school children were infected with his gaiety."

"Tanya strove to reconcile her parents. She was very fond of her mother, but she sympathized with her father's views and she pleaded with her mother to make some concessions. Sergei tried to get away from it all. Ilya was absorbed in his own material cares and family. Lev was inclined to his mother's side. Masha was on bad terms with her mother; wholeheartedly devoted to her father, she suffered more than anyone else on his account."

"In France it is often said that Tolstoi was the first and great cause of the Russian Revolution, and there is a good deal of truth in this. Nobody has done more destructive work in any country than Tolstoi. The peasant, the soldier, the public official, the nobleman, the priest, and the workman were all reached by the arrows of his accusing mind. There was nobody in the whole nation, in fact, who did not feel himself guilty, from the point of view of the severe condemnation of the great writer."

"Those who have read this book [War and Peace] will remember how the great heart of the author sought, even in the past of his people, the eternal secret of love. In Anna Karenina we find, already distinctly set forth in the personality of Levine, the aspirations of Tolstoi himself, which become more and more conscious and defined. The criticism of modern society, and all its institutions, its science and its literature; the tendency towards the simple and natural life of the people, original and novel ideas in regard to religion—all this is beginning, in the book in question, to take in the heart and brain of the writer a more or less precise form."

"Schopenhauer's ideas on women, on pain, and on freedom of conscience were always completely shared by my father. "When one suffers," said Schopenhauer, "one has the consolation of knowing that the sufferings of others may be greater than one's own." Tolstoi loved to repeat this thought, though I must confess that for me it meant nothing. To my mind, on the contrary, one may suffer still more when one has the knowledge that others are suffering also."