Novelists From Russia

"Archeologists have not discovered stages of human existence so early that they were without art. Right back in the early morning twilights of mankind we received it from Hands which we were too slow to discern. And we were too slow to ask: FOR WHAT PURPOSE have we been given this gift? What are we to do with it? And they were mistaken, and will always be mistaken, who prophesy that art will disintegrate, that it will outlive its forms and die. It is we who shall die — art will remain. And shall we comprehend, even on the day of our destruction, all its facets and all its possibilities?"

"One artist sees himself as the creator of an independent spiritual world; he hoists onto his shoulders the task of creating this world, of peopling it and of bearing the all-embracing responsibility for it; but he crumples beneath it, for a mortal genius is not capable of bearing such a burden. Just as man in general, having declared himself the centre of existence, has not succeeded in creating a balanced spiritual system. And if misfortune overtakes him, he casts the blame upon the age-long disharmony of the world, upon the complexity of today's ruptured soul, or upon the stupidity of the public. Another artist, recognizing a higher power above, gladly works as a humble apprentice beneath God's heaven; then, however, his responsbility for everything that is written or drawn, for the souls which perceive his work, is more exacting than ever. But, in return, it is not he who has created this world, not he who directs it, there is no doubt as to its foundations; the artist has merely to be more keenly aware than others of the harmony of the world, of the beauty and ugliness of the human contribution to it, and to communicate this acutely to his fellow-men. And in misfortune, and even at the depths of existence — in destitution, in prison, in sickness — his sense of stable harmony never deserts him. But all the irrationality of art, its dazzling turns, its unpredictable discoveries, its shattering influence on human beings — they are too full of magic to be exhausted by this artist's vision of the world, by his artistic conception or by the work of his unworthy fingers."

"We, holding Art in our hands, confidently consider ourselves to be its masters; boldly we direct it, we renew, reform and manifest it; we sell it for money, use it to please those in power; turn to it at one moment for amusement — right down to popular songs and night-clubs, and at another — grabbing the nearest weapon, cork or cudgel — for the passing needs of politics and for narrow-minded social ends. But art is not defiled by our efforts, neither does it thereby depart from its true nature, but on each occasion and in each application it gives to us a part of its secret inner light."

"For a country to have a great writer … is like having another government. That’s why no régime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones."

"...Вы сильны лишь постольку, поскольку отбираете у людей не всё. Но человек, у которого вы отобрали всё, — уже неподвластен вам, он снова свободен."

"A man with two trades to his credit can easily learn another ten."

"A man should build a house with his own hands before he calls himself an engineer."

"A genius doesn't adjust his treatment of a theme to a tyrant's taste"

"Beat a dog once and you only have to show him the whip."

"Can a man who's warm understand one who's freezing?"

"The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favors, it always wants more tomorrow."

"Here, lads, we live by the law of the taiga. But even here people manage to live. D’you know who are the ones the camps finish off? Those who lick other men’s left-overs, those who set store by the doctors, and those who peach on their mates."

"Human nature is full of riddles, and one of these riddles is this: How is it that people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find strength to rise up and free themselves, first in spirit then in body, while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly appear to lose the taste for freedom, lose the will to defend it, and hopelessly confused and lost almost begin to crave slavery?"

"The clock of communism has stopped striking. But its concrete building has not yet come crashing down. For that reason, instead of freeing ourselves, we must try to save ourselves from being crushed by its rubble."

"At no time has the world been without war. Not in seven or ten or twenty thousand years. Neither the wisest of leaders, nor the noblest of kings, nor yet the Church — none of them has been able to stop it. And don't succumb to the facile belief that wars will be stopped by hotheaded socialists. Or that rational and just wars can be sorted out from the rest. There will always be thousands of thousands to whom even such a war will be senseless and unjustified. Quite simply, no state can live without war, that is one of the state's essential functions. … War is the price we pay for living in a state. Before you can abolish war you will have to abolish all states. But that is unthinkable until the propensity to violence and evil is rooted out of human beings. The state was created to protect us from evil. In ordinary life thousands of bad impulses, from a thousand foci of evil, move chaotically, randomly, against the vulnerable. The state is called upon to check these impulses — but it generates others of its own, still more powerful, and this time one-directional. At times it throws them all in a single direction — and that is war."

"For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion."

"There is a word very commonly used these days: "anti-communism." It's a very stupid word, badly put together. It makes it appear as though communism were something original, something basic, something fundamental. Therefore, it is taken as the point of departure, and anti-communism is defined in relation to communism. Here is why I say that this word was poorly selected, that it was put together by people who do not understand etymology: the primary, the eternal concept is humanity. And communism is anti-humanity. Whoever says "anti-communism" is saying, in effect, anti-anti-humanity. A poor construction. So we should say: that which is against communism is for humanity. Not to accept, to reject this inhuman Communist ideology is simply to be a human being. It isn't being a member of a party."

"In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State."

"Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology."

"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"

"A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny."

"It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes. It may even lie on the surface; but we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions — especially selfish ones."

"It is almost always impossible to evaluate at the time events which you have already experienced, and to understand their meaning with the guidance of their effects. All the more unpredictable and surprising to us will be the course of future events."

"Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you — you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside."

"не к счастью устремить людей, потому что это тоже идол рынка ― "счастье"! ― а ко взаимному расположению. Счастлив и зверь, грызущий добычу, а взаимно расположены могут быть только люди! И это ― высшее, что доступно людям!"

"Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice."

"I am of course confident that I will fulfil my tasks as a writer in all circumstances — from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer’s pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history."

"Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers — such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a façade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read."

"I have understood and felt that world literature is no longer an abstract anthology, nor a generalization invented by literary historians; it is rather a certain common body and a common spirit, a living heartfelt unity reflecting the growing unity of mankind. State frontiers still turn crimson, heated by electric wire and bursts of machine fire; and various ministries of internal affairs still think that literature too is an "internal affair" falling under their jurisdiction; newspaper headlines still display: "No right to interfere in our internal affairs!" Whereas there are no INTERNAL AFFAIRS left on our crowded Earth! And mankind's sole salvation lies in everyone making everything his business; in the people of the East being vitally concerned with what is thought in the West, the people of the West vitally concerned with what goes on in the East. And literature, as one of the most sensitive, responsive instruments possessed by the human creature, has been one of the first to adopt, to assimilate, to catch hold of this feeling of a growing unity of mankind. And so I turn with confidence to the world literature of today — to hundreds of friends whom I have never met in the flesh and whom I may never see. Friends! Let us try to help if we are worth anything at all! Who from time immemorial has constituted the uniting, not the dividing, strength in your countries, lacerated by discordant parties, movements, castes and groups? There in its essence is the position of writers: expressers of their native language — the chief binding force of the nation, of the very earth its people occupy, and at best of its national spirit."

"He is our only living classic."

"He is a bad novelist and a fool. The combination usually makes for great popularity in the US."

"Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is a literary genius whose talent matches that of Dostoevsky, Turgueniev, Tolstoi, Gorki."

"Solzhenitsyn is a man of exemplary nobility and extreme bravery. A powerful novelist and an indispensable historian, he is an artist and moralist who has taken unto himself the suffering of his countrymen and has magnificently indicted a monstrous system in the name of the Soviet people and of Russian history."

"Solzhenitsyn came to embody the critical conscience of the Russian people toward Communism. But to define him simply as an anti-communist dissident would mean unfairly downsizing him. He was much more than that: he was the living denunciation of the materialistic reductionism of humanity. He saw Communism as only one of the expressions of the multifaceted ideology that haunts human beings when they lose God. In fact, he was also critical of Western materialism and called for a spiritual revival of the world—an idea that still resonates today."

"Solzhenitsyn has re-written George Orwell's novel, using the facts of his life as his pen. He represents the victory of Winston Smith. Truth, it seems, is not only stranger than fiction; it has a happier ending."

"The extraordinary political and intellectual feat of Solzhenitsyn was to emerge from the hell of concentration camp to tell the story... in books whose moral and documentary force has no parallel in modern history."

"Anyone who has read a novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn knows how Communism's egalitarian ideal produced brutal tyrannies that tried to control every aspect of life."

"Because I have known so many different writers I have often thought about what generosity means in a writer. Sometimes, as with other people you meet, you can tell about a writer at once...I am not fond of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn...not as a person and not as the author of the absurd declarations he’s made recently, criticizing Gorbachev and advancing irresponsible proposals. They haven’t convinced me one bit. I really wish that no one would interfere with Gorbachev in any way or try to place obstacles in his way. I feel that Gorbachev is a political genius and should be given more time to work out solutions that will keep his country viable. Solzhenitsyn’s anti-communism is a visceral thing and one can almost understand it. But the things he says about Russia are often absurd. And they don’t help matters. Sometimes one has a first reaction to a person which turns out to have been mistaken. But I have never liked Solzhenitsyn, and recent events don’t persuade me to revise my estimate."

"A second escape from determinism involved the discrediting of dictatorships. Tyrants had been around for thousands of years; but George Orwell's great fear, while writing 1984 on his lonely island in 1948, was that the progress made in restraining them in the 18th and 19th centuries had been reversed. Despite the defeats of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, it would have been hard to explain the first half of the 20th century without concluding that the currents of history had come to favor authoritarian politics and collectivist economics. Like Irish monks at the edge of their medieval world, Orwell at the edge of his was seeking to preserve what little was left of civilization by showing what a victory of the barbarians would mean. Big Brothers controlled the Soviet Union, China, and half of Europe by the time 1984 came out. It would have been Utopian to expect that they would stop there. But they did: the historical currents during the second half of the 20th century turned decisively against communism. Orwell himself had something to do with this: his anguished writings, together with the later and increasingly self-confident ones of Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Havel, and the future pope Karol Wojtyla, advanced a moral and spiritual critique of Marxism-Leninism for which it had no answer. It took time for these sails to catch wind and for these rudders to take hold, but by the late 1970s they had begun to do so. John Paul II and the other actor-leaders of the 1980s then set the course. The most inspirational alternatives the Soviet Union could muster were Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko, a clear sign that dictatorships were not what they once had been."

"Détente found little favour with those who saw themselves as realists. As an aspect of the tension between American policy and Ostpolitik, Kissinger scorned the Helsinki Accords; so also did Yuri Andropov, the powerful head of the KGB and the party chiefs of Belarus and Ukraine. In 1974, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, was arrested and exiled for his description of Stalinist terror in The Gulag Archipelago (1973). In Czechoslovakia, the ‘normalisation’ regime of Gustàv Husàk sought to renew the Communist Party in order to thwart the ‘dissidents’, such as Václav Havel, and their human rights organisation, Charter 77, which used the Helsinki Accords as a way to castigate the regime. In the very different context of Yugoslavia, there was also a strengthening of Communist authoritarianism as Tito suppressed the liberal Communists of both Croatia and Serbia. In East Germany, the continuing determination to control culture was demonstrated in 1976. The Palace of the Republic opened that year in East Berlin housed not only the Parliament but also leisure facilities and works of art commissioned under the rubric ‘Are Communists allowed to dream’, notably Hans Vent’s painting People on the Beach. The same year, Wolf Biermann, a prominent satirical balladeer, was expelled from East Germany."

"They are lying. We know they are lying. They know we know they are lying. Yet, they are still lying."

"The thing is that religion itself cannot but be dynamic which is why "return" is an incorrect term. A return to the forms of religion which perhaps existed a couple of centuries ago is absolutely impossible. On the contrary, in order to combat modern materialistic mores, as religion must, to fight nihilism and egotism, religion must also develop, must be flexible in its forms, and it must have a correlation with the cultural forms of the epoch. Religion always remains higher than everyday life. In order to make the elevation towards religion easier for people, religion must be able to alter its forms in relation to the consciousness of modern man."

"Of course, one cannot declare that only my faith is correct and all other faiths are not. Of course God is endlessly multi-dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God. One must not have any negative attitude to any religion but nonetheless the depth of understanding God and the depth of applying God's commandments is different in different religions. In this sense we have to admit that Protestantism has brought everything down only to faith. Calvinism says that nothing depends on man, that faith is already predetermined. Also in its sharp protest against Catholicism, Protestantism rushed to discard together with ritual all the mysterious, the mythical and mystical aspects of the Faith. In that sense it has impoverished religion."

"In different places over the years I have had to prove that socialism, which to many western thinkers is a sort of kingdom of justice, was in fact full of coercion, of bureaucratic greed and corruption and avarice, and consistent within itself that socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion. Communist propaganda would sometimes include statements such as "we include almost all the commandments of the Gospel in our ideology". The difference is that the Gospel asks all this to be achieved through love, through self-limitation, but socialism only uses coercion. This is one point. Untouched by the breath of God, unrestricted by human conscience, both capitalism and socialism are repulsive."

"We are exiting from communism in a most unfortunate and awkward way. It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed. Our government declared that it is conducting some kind of great reforms. In reality, no real reforms were begun and no one at any point has declared a coherent programme. The name of "reform" simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage."

"If one looks far into the future, one can foresee in the 21st century such a time when the U.S. together with Europe will be in dire need of Russia as an ally. ...It is puzzling only for those who don't look into the future and do not see what kind of new powers are arising in the world..."

"If one recalls the tactless declaration of President Bush about supporting Ukrainian sovereignty even before the referendum on that matter, one must conclude that all this stems from a common aim: to use all means possible, no matter what the consequences, to weaken Russia...."

"Yet an official U.S. document from 1959, the Law 86-90, does not include Russia in the list of nations oppressed by communism. On the contrary, "Russian imperialism," not communism, is held responsible for the conquest of some 20 countries--even China, Tibet and some made-up place called "Kazakia." ('Cossackia') - One is amazed that this silly law is still on the books, even today....This was not Russian imperialism, which in the past only expanded its borders somewhat. This was communist imperialism, which aimed to take over the whole world... This is complete delirium! When was Russia ever in Africa? When did Russia ever want to snatch Angola or Cuba? When was she ever in Latin America? The historical Russia has never tried to take over the world, whereas the communists had precisely this aim..."

"Before the Russian revolution, they [U.S. and Russia] were natural allies. You know that during the American Civil War, Russia supported Lincoln and the North [in contrast to Britain and France, which supported the Confederacy]. Then, we were effectively allies in the First World War. But beginning with communism, Russia ceased to exist. ..."

"For every country, great power status deforms and harms the national character. I have never wished great power status for Russia, and do not wish it for the United States. I don't wish it for Ukraine. She would not be able to perform even the cultural task required to achieve great power status: In her current borders, 63% of the population consider Russian to be their native language... And all these people will have to be re-educated in the Ukrainian language..."