Novelists From Russia

"A religion of life had come to replace a religion of penance and emaciation, of fasting and prayer. The crucified body had risen in its turn and was no longer abashed Man had reached a harmonious unity: he had discovered that he is a single being not made, like a pendulum, of two different metals,= that check each other; he realised that the foe in his members had ceased to exist."

"Socialism and rationalism are to this day the touchstones of humanity, the rocks which lie in the course of revolution and science. Groups of swimmers, driven by reflection or the waves of circumstance against these rocks, break up at once into two camps, which, under different disguises, remain the same throughout all history, and may be distinguished either in a great political party or in a group of a dozen young men. One represents logic; the other, history: one stands for dialectics; the other for evolution. Truth is the main object of the former, and feasibility of the latter."

"We were a small group of college friends who kept together after our course was over, and continued to share the same views and the same ideals. Not one of us thought of his future career or financial position. I should not praise this attitude in grown-up people, but I value it highly in a young man. Except where it is dried up by the corrupting influence of vulgar respectability, youth is everywhere unpractical, and is especially bound to be so in a young country which has many ideals and has realised few of them. Besides, the unpractical sphere is not always a fool's paradise: every aspiration for the figure involves some degree of imagination; and , but for unpractical people, practical life would never get beyond a tiresome repetition of the old routine."

"There is no art more akin to mysticism than architecture. Abstract, geometrical, musical and yet dumb, passionless, it depends entirely upon symbolism, form and suggestion. Simple lies, and the harmonious combination and numerical relations between these, present something mysterious and at the same time incomplete."

"Personal freedom is a magnificent thing; by it and by it alone can a nation achieve its true freedom. Man must respect and honor his freedom in himself no less than in his neighbor or in the people at large."

"It is both painful and shameful to be a slave. But it is even more distressing and painful to acknowledge that our slavery is necessary and normal and that it is a natural phenomenon. A great sin rests on our souls. We have inherited it but are not responsible for it. We are keeping our inheritance unjustly. Like a heavy rock it pushes us to the bottom, and with it around our necks we cannot swim. WE are slaves because our forefathers sold their human dignity for inhuman rights which we now enjoy. We are slaves because we are the masters. We are slaves because we are nobles, that is, nobles without any faith in our tights. We are slaves because we hold our brothers in slavery. They are our equals in birth, blood and language. We will never enjoy freedom as long as the wretched conditions of serfdom oppress us and as long as the hideous shameful, and totally unjust slavery of our peasants exists among us."

"Без равенства нет брака. Жена, исключённая из всех интересов, занимающих её мужа, чуждая им, не делящая их, — наложница, экономка, нянька, но не жена в полном, в благородном значении слова."

"The world carnage put an end to the golden era when a Bakunin and a Herzen, a Marx and a Kropotkin, a Malatesta and a Lenin, Vera Sazulich, Louise Michel, and all the others could come and go without hindrance. In those days who cared about passports or visas? Who worried about one particular spot on earth? The whole world was one's country."

"The peasants will be emancipated if there is a future for Rus and for the Slavic world."

"An empire that cannot distance itself from such a gruesome sin that so deeply affects its internal structure does not have the right to education, to future development and participation in history."

"I have a sincere pity for any nation where old heads grow on young shoulders; youth is a matter, not only of years, but of temperament."

"Reading Pirozhkova's memoir, I feel I have come to know something of the man, to see Babel and his work in some common brilliant light of the hopeful Revolution, unending love of the people as well as people, darkened at the edges by fate, the busy encroachment of evil. But Antonina Pirozhkova will tell you the whole story. Though she lived only seven years inside it, hardly an hour escaped her loving attention, and then her memory. He is, as she was determined, restored to us a great writer, a good man."

"Babel's grandmother had admonished: "You Must Know Everything." He did try. And eventually he knew a great deal. He knew war. He knew work. He knew love. He gave long classical reading lists to Pirozhkova. He didn't like literary talk. He didn't want to discuss his work. Sad for her and sad for us. Maybe, among his other thoughts, he hoped to protect her, a powerful and responsible working woman important in the construction of the new Soviet infrastructure. Was he also trying to save her from the destructive forces of disillusion? When Lion Feuchtwanger visited, she asked Babel what they'd talked about. "He spoke of his impressions of the U.S.S.R. and of Stalin," he said. "He told me many bitter truths." Then Babel said no more."

"We know that great boxes of his manuscripts were carted off by the NKVD. Among them, Pirozhkova is sure (and I am, too), was his book to be called "New Stories." Did "they" fear these stories! He held them up for the usual scrutiny-one day or one year too long. We really don't know about his production. We do know that we wish we had a lot more of his stories."

"For the most part, I have tried to say something in these few pages about what I feel for Babel's work. It was the work of a man who, like the Gedali character from Red Cavalry, longed for the joy-giving Revolution, thought he would wait as long as he could. He thought he could put his own joyful spirit out like an oar in history's river and deflect the Revolution's iron boat by acting in a straightforward way for others. He thought laughter and jokes might work. In fact, Pirozhkova learned that one of his arresters had been asked by the interrogator in charge, "Did he try to make a joke?""

"When I read Antonina Nikolaevna Pirozhkova's memoir of daily life with Isaac Babel I realized that I'd known very little about him. Only his death was famous. And of course until fairly recently most of us had that wrong, too. But I did know his work, though not until the early sixties, when the Meridian edition first appeared. One must begin by telling those who still don't know those stories that they are unusual in a particular way. That is, any one of them, those in Red Cavalry and Tales of Odessa, as well as those extracted only in the last few years from bureaus and closets of old Russian friends, can be read again and again. I don't mean every five or ten years. I mean in one evening a story you read just six months ago can be read a couple of times-and not because the story is a difficult one. There's so much plain nutrition in it, the absolute accuracy and astonishment in the language, the breadth of the body and the height of the soul. You do feel yourself healthier, spiritually speaking, if also sadder-or happier, depending on the story...The fact is, there's a larger, more varied population in Babel's four, five hundred pages of stories than in any three novels of most writers."

"His writing was sharp and to the point, and he wrote what you might call sketches, rather like Chekhov's...He wasn't a red, though he was a writer who Gorky admired. They killed Babel later on, the swine!"

"some stories, I must admit, you simply can't read more than once every couple of years, because in reading them, sorrow grips you so. An example would be the first story of Red Cavalry, "Crossing Over to Poland.""

"The vagrant moon trailed through the town and I tagged along, nurturing within me unfulfillable dreams and dissonant songs."

"The two that I feel I have most responded to, and probably because they have lived through, and been inspired by, times of crisis, are Chekhov and Babel...when I had accepted my immigrant status in the New World, the energy and the brashness and the art of compression of The Odessa Tales by Isaac Babel even more forcefully. Chekhov and Babel were formative authors for me, but not models. Because in the seventies, eighties, and even early nineties, I was writing about North American residents who hadn't yet been written of too much in American fiction, I had to improvise a form. Babel's art of compression appealed to me. The art of compression is not minimalism. It's the exact opposite of minimalism. What I learned from Babel's stories is that you can pack in thirty kinds of emotional and linguistic nuances into one clause and thirty different historical, political conflicts and concessions into one paragraph."

"It sometimes appears that all I value as a writer are being deliberately denigrated or disregarded by the scholars. What is important to me is Isaac Babel saying, "A comma placed just right will stab the heart," whereas for a lot of these scholars, judging from the papers that I've read, to worry about artistic or meter-effective placement of punctuation is to be sort of right wing."

"Among other intentions, I think Babel hoped to tell two kinds of stories-the first about lives absolutely unlike his own, in order to understand, or at least know and maybe even become like the "others." But a second need was to say, Look, that life is like mine. I am after all like him and he like me. What a relief!"

"When a phrase is born, it is both good and bad at the same time. The secret of its success rests in a crux that is barely discernible. One’s fingertips must grasp the key, gently warming it. And then the key must be turned once, not twice."

"I read somewhere that Isaac Babel said that his main problem was that he had no imagination. And I thought about that a lot, because if you read him, you know that what he's trying to say-except for a few pieces, such as "The Sin of Jesus"-is very close to his life, the terrifying life that he led in the Cossack Red Army during, I guess, 1920, '21, ‘22. And so I tried to figure out exactly what he meant. I guess what he really didn't understand was the amount of imagination it had taken for him to understand what had happened, what was real. There were people in his unit who, if they had tried to tell him what was going on in this particular hut or pogrom-suffering village, couldn't have. Yet he was able to use what he did know about life and poverty and war to stretch toward what he didn't know about the Cossack Red Army. So I think about that as the fact of the imagination."

"my favorite writer, the writer that I loved the most for a long time, was Isaak Babel. First of all, I was doing short stories then I began to read him—I hadn’t read him—and I felt, Oh my, it’s just what I want to do. He’s really writing about things he doesn’t exactly know and yet he’s trying to understand, he’s using writing to try to understand the world and that’s what I want to do. And that’s what I do. I write about things I don’t know all that well just to try and understand them. The act of writing is an investigative, learning act."

"Sometimes you come to literature that seems related to your own in some ways, but after you've been writing for a while. And then you feel terribly corroborated….Isaac Babel. When I read him, also after many years, I said, "Wow! He had the same Mommy and Daddy I had!""

"if you want to read spectacularly graceful distillations of spectacularly intense, complex, ephemeral experience, you could hardly do better than stories in Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry."

"The fullest and most sophisticated portrait of Russian Jewry during the last decade of czarist Russia, at the time of the Revolution and the civil war, and in its first years under Soviet rule is found in the works of Isaac Babel."

"At moments when such thoughts came to him, Shloyme became unnaturally animated, walked up to his son, wanted to talk to him with passion and at great length, to give him advice on a couple of things, but... it had been such a long time since he had spoken to anyone, or given anyone advice. And the words froze in his toothless mouth, his raised arm dropped weakly."

"When the mass terror erupted in 1936, however, Birobidzhan would be the stage of frightful liquidations, a real pogrom against Jewish communists, the pioneers of this 'centre of Jewish culture. From one day to the next, Professor Liberberg, president of the republic's executive committee, disappeared; a few months later, a newspaper revealed that he had been 'unmasked' as a 'cowardly counterrevolutionary and Trotskyist, a bourgeois nationalist'; in 1937 and 1938, his successors experienced the same fate. In all the regions where a Jewish population was concentrated, thousands of activists of the Jewish sections, party militants, journalists of the Yiddish press and other writers were arrested; among many others, such major figures as Isaac Babel and Osip Mandelstam vanished in the maelstrom."

"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."

"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)"

"[Oblomov:] "Picture a thief or a fallen woman or a cheated fool, if you like, but do not forget the rest of mankind. What about humanity, pray? Writers like yourself try to write only with the head. What? Do you suppose the intellect can work separately from the heart? Why, the intellect needs love to fertilize it. Rather, stretch out your hand to the fallen and raise him, weep over him if he is lost beyond recall, but in no case make sport of him, for he is one to whom there should be extended only compassion. See in him yourself, and act accordingly. That done, I will read you, and bow my head before you." [...] "Give me man, and man alone" said Oblomov. "And, having given me him, do you try to love him.""

"To this day the Russian, though surrounded by a stern, unimaginative world of reality, loves to believe the seductive tales of antiquity. And long will it be before he will have been weaned from that belief."

"[Goncharov's] best work is Oblomov (1857), which exposed the laziness and apathy of the smaller landed gentry in Russia anterior to the reforms of Alexander II. Russian critics have pronounced this work to be a faithful characterization of Russia and the Russians. Dobrolubov said of it, “Oblomofka [the country-seat of the Oblomovs] is our fatherland: something of Oblomov is to be found in every one of us.” Peesarev, another celebrated critic, declared that “Oblomovism,” as Goncharov called the sum total of qualities with which he invested the hero of his story, “is an illness fostered by the nature of the Slavonic character and the life of Russian society.”"

"‘The Don! The Don! The gentle Don! Our father; giver of our food! Hurrah!’"

"The grass grows over the graves, time overgrows the pain. The wind blew away the traces of those who had departed; time blows away the bloody pain and the memory of those who did not live to see their dear ones again—and will not live, for brief is human life, and not for long is any of us granted to tread the grass."

"In this winter night, long and ample for bitter memories, many a widow who lost her husband in the war and is now left alone will press her palms to her ageing face; and in the nocturnal darkness the burning tears, as bitter as wormwood, will scorch her fingers."

"When swept out of its normal channel, life scatters into innumerable streams. It is difficult to foresee which it will take in its treacherous and winding course. Where to-day it flows in shallows, like a rivulet over sandbanks, so shallow that the shoals are visible, to-morrow it will flow richly and fully."

"And over the village slipped the days, passing into the nights; the weeks flowed by, the months crept on, the wind howled, and, glassified with an autumnal, translucent, greenish-azure, the Don flowed tranquilly down to the sea."

"Sometimes life played with him, sometimes it hung on him like a stone round the neck of a drowned man."

"Никаких философских проблем нет, есть только анфилада лингвистических тупиков, вызванных неспособностью языка отразить Истину."

"In Russia, history is something that, you know, used to be rewritten every five years. It's written once again, and it's just a game."

"The hell with it. Who never knew the price of happiness will not be happy."

"I was overjoyed when I read Yevtushenko's "Babi Yar"; the poem astounded me. It astounded thousands of people…People knew about Babi Yar before Yevtushenko's poem, but they were silent. And when they read the poem, the silence was broken. Art destroys silence."

"He has a clear style and has had much courage – as in his poem "Babi Yar", a memorial to the Jews murdered by the Nazis. But he is no more than a talented poetaster – which is quite obvious to all but Western journalists – and it would be foolish to consider him as more than a skilful publicist."

"Politics had much to do with tastes in poetry. Russian poets, especially if they were politically outspoken, were garnering huge followings among college students in the West. Yevgeny Yevtushenko was having a big year in 1968, both in political controversy at home and in artistic recognition abroad. Born in 1933, he belonged to a new school of Russian lyric poetry. Critics frequently suggested that others from the new school, such as Boris Pasternak’s protégé Andrey Voznesensky, also born in 1933, were better poets. But in the 1960s Yevtushenko was the most famous working Russian poet in the world. In 1962 he published four poems highly critical of the Soviet Union, including “Babi Yar,” about a massacre of Jews unsuccessfully covered up by the Soviets."

"The worldwide sensation created by the appearance in 1961 of a brief poem, "Babi Yar," by Yevgeni Yevtushenko , condemning Nazi and prerevolutionary antisemitism, and the mutilation by Soviet censorship of Babi Yar (1966; Eng. 1967, revised 1970), a documentary novel by Anatoli Kuznetsov about the Nazi massacre of Soviet Jews in a ravine near Kiev, demonstrate that, in contrast to other areas of Soviet life, there was no real thaw in Soviet literature's treatment of Jewish themes."

"Although the USA eventually overtook the [[w:Soviet_space_programme|Soviet [space] programme]], the early feats were widely remembered. Gagarin had the looks and affability of a film star and toured the world as his country’s semiofficial ambassador. He gave a human face to the communist order. Others did the same. Yevgeni Yevtushenko, an overrated poet but a larger-than-life personality and an advocate of de-Stalinisation, gave public readings in North America and Europe. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich appeared in the world’s main languages in 1963; its withering critique of the labour-camp system in the 1940s was taken as proof that the USSR was starting to look at its past with honest eyes. Soccer goalkeeper Lev Yashin was widely renowned. Soviet athletics teams had regular success at the Olympic games and brought glamour to the USSR."

"[I] do not like poems that resemble hay compressed into a geometrically perfect cube. I like it when the hay, unkempt, uncombed, with dry berries mixed in it, thrown together gaily and freely, bounces along atop some truck—and more, if there are some lovely and healthy lasses atop the hay—and better yet if the branches catch at the hay, and some of it tumbles to the road."