"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."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
cited and discussed in Peter Doyle, Iurii Dombrovskii: Freedom Under Totalitarianism, Routledge, 2000, p. 145
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Yury_Dombrovsky
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Yury Dombrovsky
Yury Osipovich Dombrovsky [Ю́рий О́сипович Домбро́вский] (12 May 1909 – 29 May 1978) was a Russian writer who spent nearly eighteen years in Soviet prison camps and exile.
2 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Yury Dombrovsky →
Related Quotes
"The war hung over us like a storm cloud. […] They told us how the animals escaped from the zoo after the bombing raid…"
"This, then, was the yeast on which Barad-Dur rose six centuries ago, that amazing city of alchemists and poets, mecha…"
"“What are we wizards but consumers of that which our predecessors have created, while they are creators of new knowle…"
"“You know, those who are motivated by greed, lust for power, or wounded pride are half-way tolerable, at least they f…"
"“Craft the Final Solution to the Mordorian problem, sure, but when it’s time to implement it, you always hide in the …"
"“In two or three decades the Elves will turn Middle Earth into a well-tended tidy lawn, and Men into cute pets; they …"
"I have filled the gaps in Tzerlag’s story at my own discretion. The old soldier bears no responsibility for my invent…"
"I have to sonorously remind those critics that The Lord of the Rings is the historiography of the victors, who have a…"
"We develop a for computing sums over random surfaces which arise in all problems containing (like , three-dimensional…"
"We have no better way of describing elementary particles than quantum field theory. A quantum field in general is an …"