People From Moscow

"Life is full of situations cut short, unfinished observations, everything that doesn’t fit in the parameters of a story that would make sense to strangers. We keep them to ourselves and we carry them away with us."

"That was practically blasphemy, asking Gordon for an explanation, frail octogenarian Gordon. Demanding an explanation after Gordon had made it very clear that his word was the truth. But no, in this room that was the birthplace of the unified field theory, this was not sacrilege. Both men were subject to the same law, which was greater than both of them, and that law made it necessary for Gordon to offer substantiating proof. He could not violate it, or else science would turn into religion, and he into its high priest."

"If you’ve ever heard a physicist trying to explain to a mere mortal the meaning of quantum mechanics or the theory of relativity, you’ll understand our state. Some waves or other of time overlapping so as to create time splashes that broke off from their substratum into supratime and could be controlled – that’s all I got out of Lyova’s lectures and the popular articles written by my fellow journalists. But in the long run I wasn’t too upset about it. We use electricity without knowing a thing about electrodynamics, and I have yet to see anyone who was too bothered by that fact to go on living."

"“I’m not saying that you don’t exist. You exist falsely.” “But I’m flying!” “That’s the point. A man can’t fly on his own. That would be a miracle. People with little grounding in physics are apt to believe anything, but we know that there is no place for miracles in nature.”"

"“In traveling to the past, you can either appear in a predetermined point in space or in a predetermined point in time. In principle, it is impossible to do both simultaneously.” (Fundamental Temporalics, A.D. 2023)"

"Here, now, in the deep Middle Ages, all this served as a safety valve. People experienced the illusion of being at one with themselves, with others, with that mystical being that was there in the church, watching over them and preserving them, chiding and blessing, enlightening and repressing, uplifting and reconciling. A completely different, anxiety-ridden emotional state, and an understandable, but repellent, spiritual world."

"Just try telling a teenager that he’s a conformist. Ha! It’s safer to tweak a tiger’s whiskers. Yet who’s most influenced by fads and fashions? Who is the easiest to turn into a raging mob? The teenager."

"When the mind tries to guess the trajectory of a future moral act and concentrates too strenuously on contradictory concepts, the concepts themselves become unclear, because every concept is as deep-rooted and murky in its beginnings as the reality of life that gave rise to it. And the mind falters, determination slips away, and everything seems confused and wrong. That’s how thinking can sometimes destroy determination."

"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.""

"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."

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

"The war hung over us like a storm cloud. […] They told us how the animals escaped from the zoo after the bombing raid and rushed about the streets. They fled not from people, but to people, and, let's say, the bear roared and shook its paw, the ostrich waved a burnt wing, and the elephant knelt, lifted its trunk and trumpeted plaintively. But what could people do when the earth was burning beneath them? A coral aspid, a very venomous and beautiful snake, slithered up to the sixth floor and meekly curled up under someone's bed. And in these stories about the ruins of great cities, about streets where African reptiles creep and dying elephants trumpet, there was something from Wells and from the Apocalypse — more generally from legends about the end of the world and the total destruction of humanity. (Russian text)"

"It was indeed a dead grove, made up of the corpses of trees. Even the wood of these corpses was non-living, a deathly grey, silver-green, with peeling bark; and the bark had also flaked, shrivelling and simply sloughing off like dead skin. And arching along all the dead twigs, crawled a supple, clutching, lashing, bold convolvulus-serpent. It was her leaves which glowed a cheerful green on the dead branches, on all their agonizing bifurcations; it was her flowers which hung on the branches from clusters of tiny suckers and tentacles, astonishingly tender and serene. They were so alien to that austere and honest deathly sterility that they seemed almost dazzling. It was like an explosion of something splendid, like the sombre and magical secret of that dead river and its dry valley. There was something about that copse reminiscent of the hut on chickens' legs, or Koschei's hoard, or the field sown with dead men's bones."

"Maybe the Jews interfered in the American elections, maybe the Jews control the world, maybe Jews slaughtered the Jews in Poland. For all those allegations, there is one origin: Jew-hatred"

"The era that humanity has entered is an era of industrial development and therefore the organisation of artistic elements must be applied to the design of the material elements of everyday life, i.e. to industry or to so-called production. The new industrial production, in which artistic creativity must participate, will differ radically from the traditional aesthetic approach to the object, in that primarily attention will be focused not on the artistic decoration of the object (applied art), but on the artistic organisation of the object in accordance with the principles of creating the most utilitarian object.. ..If any of the different types of fine art (i.e., easel painting, drawing, engraving, sculpture, etc.) can still retain some purpose, they will do so only * 1. while they remain as the laboratory phase in our search for essential new forms * 2. insofar as they serve as supportive projects and schemes for constructions and utilitarian and industrially manufactured objects that have yet to be realised"

"The role of the 'representational arts' - painting, sculpture, and even architecture.. ..has ended, as it is no longer necessary for the consciousness of our age, and everything art has to offer can simply be classified as a throwback."

"A cotton print is as much a product of artistic culture as a painting, and there is no basis for drawing a dividing line between them. Moreover.. ..the conviction is growing that painting is dying, that it is inseparably linked with the forms of the capitalist system and its cultural ideology, and that textile design has become the focus of creative concern – that the textile print and work on the textile print is the height of artistic work."

"The Constructivists recklessly spoke of replacing art with life and wanted to make the object of production the object of art. Tatlin built a stove in his room to keep from freezing, sewed a specially tailored coat to keep from shivering in the wind, and cut himself a comfortable work suit. Playing with the industrial production of an object was not the last motivation of the design solutions of the Moscow Constructivists."

"In her diary, Popova recorded Tatlin's story about how, right before his departure from Paris for Moscow [in 1913], he visited 'Pavel' Picasso himself.. ..(see A. Strigalev, O poezdke Tatlina v Berlin i Parizh, in 'Iskusstvo 2' (1989), pp. 39-43).. .After seeing Picasso's Cubist constructions, Tatlin said, he began to work according to other principles [than Cubism ]."

"Our new aim is the organisation of the material environment, i.e. of contemporary industrial production, and all active artistic creativity must be directed towards this."

"Although she had not joined the Working Group of Constructivists, she had exhibited with Rodchenko and Stepanova in September 1921 at the 5 x 5 = 25 exhibition. In this show she exhibited paintings that she called 'spatial force constructions' and wrote in the catalogue that the paintings exhibited 'are to be regarded only as series of preparatory experiments towards concrete material constructions.'"

"'Letatlin' (1929-32) is a flying bird, Tatlin's bicycle, on which one can 'sail' through the air. In artistic circles reactions varied yet all struck basically the same chord: he's flown out of art, - a move into technology.."

"Tatlin does not transcend the confines of Cubism."

"[Tatlin and his 'Letatlin'] an amazing character, but absolutely no artist."

"An absurd and naive, monstrous beast [ Tatlin's Tower ] with a radio-telegraph horn on its head and the legislative assembly of the Third International in its belly?"

"If the idea of the monument [ Tatlin's Tower ] is truly new and valuable, then it will never die. Prophets have not always been stoned and imposters have not always succeeded."

"The Council of People's Commissars would flee from such a building on the first sunny day and, camped out nearby on the grass, would immediately issue a decree that Tatlin's tower is for rent, at public auction, to horticulturists wishing to grow pineapples."

"['Letatlin' is] not so much.. ..an invention as.. ..a sui-generis work of art"

"Christina Lodder, in 'Liubov Popova: From Painting to Textile Design', Tate Papers, no.14, Autumn 2010"

"I am familiar with Tatlin's theatrical designs in which there is a charming and original quality of color and an unusual balancing [ekvilibristika] of line-{illeg.}. Perhaps this is only trickery, but even trickery is already an art, and for this talent is required."

"[Tatlin, in a lecture] expressed his dissatisfaction with authorities who did not really support his endeavors to work in industrial concerns."

"Let's split open our figures and place the environment inside them."

"In reinforced concrete we have not only a new material but, of far greater consequence, new constructions and a new method for designing buildings. Therefore, in using [reinforced concrete], we have to renounce the old traditions and concern ourselves with meeting new tasks."

"[iron and glass, the] 'materials of the new Classicism'."

"The engineers made hard forms. Evil. With angles. They are easily broken. The world is round and soft.."

"The influence of my art is expressed in the movement of the Constructivists, of which I am the founder – Tatlin."

"[Moscow, Spring of 1914:] Dear Sirs, On the 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, and 14th of May this year the studio of Vladimir Tatlin (57 Ostozhenka, apartment 3) will be open from 6 to 8 p.m. for a free viewing of his synthetic-static compositions. In addition, at seven o'clock on the aforementioned days, the Futurist Sergei Podgaevskii will dynamically declaim his latest poetic transrational records."

"The dream [of flying] is as old as Icarus.. .I too want to give back to man the feeling of flight [with his 'Letatlin'-air-bike, 1929-1932]. This we have been robbed of by the mechanical flight of the aeroplane. We cannot feel the movement of our body in the air."

"[to create] A union of purely artistic forms for a utilitarian purpose.. [referring to his Tower / Monument, with a height of 400 meters, but never constructued]"

"It [ [his Tower ] was to be dynamic, both in its outward form and inward activity.."

"[the task of material culture is] to shed light on the tasks of production in our country, and also to discover the place of the artist-constructor in production, in relation to improving the quality both of the manufactured product and of the organization of the new way of life in general."

"We shall provoke you to acts of terror and then crush you."

"Here lies Evgeny Kissin, son of the Jewish people, a servant of music."

"He is everything you want in a surrogate because he believes in his candidate."

"Boris is abrasive, that is who he is both on the air and off."

"Barack Obama may have won in 2008 in North Carolina due to illegal voting."

"He sees every night as combat and he goes in as very combative."

"We all know why the Democrats had him there, it’s to obscure the fact that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have failed at keeping this country safe."

"Doroszewski [was] the author of the most important dictionary of the 20th-century Polish language (at least in the category of general-purpose dictionaries)."

"Professor Witold Doroszewski (1899–1976) was an exceptional personality, a man of great talent and great labour, which ensured him a glittering and rapid career resulting i.a. in the linguistic school that formed around him in the Warsaw academia. The basis of his academic achievements was an original philosophical concept originating from Aristotelian monism, the centre of which was the notion of homo loquens (a talking man). With respect to linguistics, Witold Doroszewski’s outstanding accomplishments are concerned with word formation; lexicography, lexicology and semantics; culture of language; dialectology; general linguistics. Professor Witold Doroszewski’s achievements correspond with various streams of contemporary linguistics and are an object of a continuing academic discourse."