RUSSIAN LITERATURE QUOTES

Quotes

"It is not the little books that are dangerous, but that there is nothing for us to eat."

"Russia vomited out the abomination that they were feeding it."

"It is a property of the Russian people to indulge in philosophy. ...[but] the fate of the philosopher in Russia is painful and tragic."

"What is Kerensky?
A usurper, whose place is in Peter-Paul prison, with Kornilov and Kishkin.
A criminal and a traitor to the workers, soldiers and peasants,
who believed in him.
Kerensky? A murderer of soldiers!
Kerensky? A public executioner of peasants!
Kerensky? A strangler of workers!
Such is the second Kornilov who now wants to butcher Liberty!"

"You do not, I see, quite understand the Russian public. Its character is determined by the condition of Russian society, which contains, imrpisoned within it, fresh forces seething and bursting to break out; but crushed by heavy repression and unable to escape, they produce gloom, bitter depression, apathy. Only in literature, in spite of our Tartar censorship, there is still some life and forward movement. This is why the writer's calling enjoys such respect among us, why literary success is so easy here even when there is little talent. This is why, especially among us, universal attention is paid..to every manifestation of any so-called liberal trend, no matter how poor the writer's gifts...The public...sees in Russian writers its only leaders, defenders and saviors from dark autocracy, Orthodoxy and the national way of life..."

"Like most Soviet leaders, czars cast themselves as censors for the most troublesome writers. Nicholas I was the personal censor for Pushkin. Count Leo Tolstoy, like dissident writers today, smuggled some of his controversial works to the West for publication, and Dostoevsky was banished to Siberia. The Soviet practice of putting dissidents in mental hospitals had its precedent in the famous case of Pyotr Chaadayev, an eminent early 19th century scientist and thinker who was officially branded insane for an essay that condemned Russia as backward and advocated Westernization and Catholocism as a panacea."

"Some time before the war the Austro-Hungarian government received a sharp note from St Petersburg, demanding that a stop be put to the activities of the Russian political emigrants in Vienna. The Minister of the Interior received the note and shook with laughter: 'Who do they think is going to start a revolution in Russia - perhaps that Herr Trotsky from the Café Central?'"

"Nowhere else in the world is poetry accorded such religious reverence or the poet so celebrated as priest and oracle as in Russia. If ordinary people escape into alcoholism, intellectuals flee into books, especially poetry, finding there the spiritual compensation for the ennui of ordinary life. "We have no philosophers or political commentators in your sense, no folk singers with moral messages, and no religion for most people," Voznesensky observed to Ann and me one evening...."So there is a vacuum. People need something for their spirit, and they turn to poets. Some come for entertainment and others for religion or politics or philosophy. They expect all this from the poet. That's why he is so important in Russia. And he always has been, under czarism as well as Communism. For daring poetry- or daring art of any kind- teeters on the line of controntation between tyranny and talent, where censorship and creativity inevitably collide. People come to a poetry reading to see how far the poet dares defy the political laws of gravity and whether he will keep his balance on the high wire or lose it and suffer the consequences. This becomes a cat-and-mouse game between Authority and the intelligentsia, natual enemies through Russian history."

"The most cunning dramatic exercise in double-ententres that I saw in Moscow, however, was Balalaikin and Company, which many intellectuals I knew took as a deliciously apt and funny commentary on their lives- the timid silence of the intelligentsia, their fawning fear of the police and political authority, their turning to walks, to feasting and to drinking as a susbstitute for intellectual freedom and activity, their penchant for philosophizing during drunken bouts and their inaction afterward, their compulsion for hiding the flaws of Russian life from foreigners, the double-talk they use to appease the powers-that-be, their readiness to toady to Authority."

"The political and intellectual tension over Balalaikin and similar works of art is what gives our cultural life pockets of citality. In the West everything is possible, so almost nothing is desperately precious. In Russia, almost nothing of great merit is possible, and so almost nothing is immensely treasured. The choice of good books is so small that you appreciate every single one of them. I know a man who used to carry his favorite books around with him- Pasternak, Mandelshtam, Akhmatova. When he visited America he was impressed by how many copies were available and then he was depressed that no one was buying them. He told me, 'I could not live in a country where Mandelshtam was not properly appreciated'...Russian intellectuals do keenly prize artistic excellence, because they are so starved for it, and this unstinting appreciation is one of the most attractive features of Soviet cultural life...Russian intellectuals treasure any unusual poetry reading, concert or foreign film and talk about it for months afterward as a major event in their lives."

"Of all the self-appointed carriers of culture, Nadezhda Mandelshtam personifies most clearly the living conduit of knowledge that is officially dead. Her frail husband, Osip Mandelshtam, perhaps the greatest Russian poet of the century, paid with his life for a 14-line poem that mocked Stalin as "the Kremlin mountaineer, the murderer" with a "cockroach whiskers leer" and "fingers fat as grubs." Mandelshtam vanished in the Stalinist camps, dead roughly in 1938- no one has pinpointed the date. In 1973, delayed by censors for 13 years, a collection of some of his poetry was published and marketed almost entirely abroad, in callous disregard of the hunger for Mandelshtam's work among his own people. The colume was bereft, not surprisingly, of his most trenchant verse, those either too virile or too tragic for Soviet censors. Those poems have appeared only in the West, thanks to his widow's tenecious efforts to insure that the legacy did not perish. Like a hunted rabbit, as Joseph Brodsky put it, she dodged about the country for years after his death, avoiding arrest and preserving the treasure of Mandelshtam's poetry by scattering it among friends for safe-keeping and memorizing practically every line, thus making herself a living archive."

"Individual stories, plays, reading flashed momentarily from time to time because since Stalin's death, the Party felt the need to allow safety valves in order to enlist gifted writers and other intellectuals in its cause with the offer of some flexibility though it curbed their most rebellious proclivities...But the focus of each was limited and narrow, their treatment more subtle than daring."

(On Russian Literature from 1955-1965)
"For the first half of the Seventies lacked the thrust, direction and above all, the sense of community and hope of the Khrushchev era. 'There were ten years of my life, 1955 to 1965, when I thought that today is not so good but tomorrow will be better,' Nina Voronel told me. (As a Jew, she later emigrated, but there were others, non-Jews who stayed in Moscow, who voiced similar sentiments.) 'For others maybe, this went on a bit longer, a bit later. But for me, these ten years had a very nice feeling. I felt it was possible to be published eventually. I wrote things that could not be published at the time but I thought this was temporary and they would be published later. But then the trial of Sinyavski and Daniel [in 1966] was like a crash. Others had their own crash later. The Six-Day War. Czechoslovakia. It got harder to publish. We love hope.'" BR>

"Under Khrushchev, what was known as the "Tribune of Poets"- Yevtushenko, Voznesensky, Bella Akhmadulina, Robert Rozhdestvensky- fired the imagination of the young. New theaters like Taganka and Sovremennik burst into life. Periodically, Khrushchev would scold and rein in the liberals but his erratic lurches of policy and his de-Stalinization campaign provided flexibility that could be exploited more readily by the intelligentsia than the grayer, more controlled atmosphere of Brezhnev's Russia in the years after Czechoslovakia.
Probably the most painful setback to literary liberals was the forced removal in early 1970 of Aleksandr Tvardovsky as chief editor of New World magazine, long a liberal beacon. It was Tvardovsky, himself a successful and ironic poet, who had discovered Solzhenitsyn and most other unorthodox writers." New World was finished as a magazine when Tvardovskywas removed" a successful satirist lamented to me. "If you had read it for ten years while he was editor, you could have learned much about Soviet life. But after that, not much. He was a wonderful editor. He suffered greatly for that magazine and for his writers. He printed much that without him would never have seen the light of day." This man told me that when he had tried to put together a book of collected articles recently, the censors blocked the most daring ones- although they had been published earlier by Tvardovsky.
This sense of retrenchment in the early Seventies was felt by many other with whom I talked. Writers like Lidiya Chukovskaya and Vladimir Voinovich were kicked out of the Writer's Union for supporting Solzhenitsyn or publishing works abroad that the authorities found offensive, like Voinovich's Ivan Chonkin, a satire of bumbling inefficiency in the Soviet bureaucracy and the Army which the author tried vainly to publish in Moscow for a decade. Other writers privately complained of what had been cut from works of theirs that did appear. "Never judge what a Soviet writer thinks by what appears in his books," a middle-aged dramatist bitterly warned me one evening. "We have all learned to submit to censorship and, what is worse, to censor ourselves. You and your heroic New York Times wouldn't be so brave if you knew that the price of exposing Nixon or of editorials your government doesn't like was [exile to] Siberia or being blacklisted for life. When you see people here getting excited over Aitmatov or someone else, it is because he has found a way to eke out a bit more honesty than usual. But it is a matter of degree only. If someone manages to be 20 or 30 percent honest about our life, it is considered a sensation."

"More than one writer observed to me, however, that it was the attraction of big royalties, large editions and big audiences, or of country dachas, and the chance to travel abroad and other perquisites- as much as censorship- that has bought off many would-be "liberals". ideological stalwarts who write patriotic themes are usually the most richly rewarded. Vadim Kozhevnikov, an author of many war novels and cold war spy thrillers- some picked up a million-ruble fortune. other writers have bargained for much less but the materialist most of the Seventies has affected many. "Who's going to worry about daring poetry," quipped one successful poet, "when he's anxious to get in line for a new Zhiguli car?""

"So blasé have Westerners become about Solzhenitsyn's exile in Zurich that they have forgotten the breathtaking vulnerability of his existence in those years- the constant fear that each new act of defiance would hurl him back to slow death in Siberia where he had languished for eight years and contracted cancer after his arrest for some critical remarks about Stalin in a wartime letter to a friend.

In those days, Solzhenitsyn was a totally secluded figure. Almost no one saw him, let alone for an interview. In magnificent silence, he had created a sensation by appearing bareheaded at the wintery funeral of Aleksandr Tvardovsky in December 1971. Tvardovsky, as the liberal editor of New World magazine, was the man who had persuaded Khrushchev to permit publication of Solzhenitsyn's first searing novella of the Stalinist camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Again, the excitment was electric when in mid-March, Solzhenitsyn went to the Moscow Conservatory for a concert by Mstislav Rostropovich, the cellist who had brooked the Kremlin's anger by giving shelter to Solzhenitsyn in his dacha. Controversy was building around August, 1914, just published in Russian. A new confrontation loomed because Solzhenitsyn was defiantly bent on having a private ceremony in Moscow to recieve the Nobel Peace Prize for literature which he had won in 1970. He had never dared to leave the country to collect it for fear the Moscow would slam the door on his return."

(On the tendency of Russians to read meaning into art forms) "So prone are Russians to read significance into every art form that they can find political overtures even in musical performances. In December 1872, Mstislav Rostropovich was under a ban against foreign travel and was severely restricted in his home concerts. The Kremlin, angered over his giving refuge in his home to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, nonetheless permitted him to appear several evenings during the Moscow Winter Festival of the Arts. One highlight was his performance of a new composition by Poland's leading composer, Witold Litoslawski, written especially for Rostropovich. By Moscow standards it was very modern, dissonant, unorthodox. Rostropovich took the precaution of rehearsing it discreetly with the orchestra only a few times before performing it at the Moscow Conservatory, a favorite haven of the liberal intelligentsia. Russian friends of mine who saw the performance interpreted it as more than the bold airing of provacatively modern music. They saw it as a deliberate statement of the cellist's and the composer's philosophy. In several passages the lone lyrical voice of Rostropovich's cello struggled to be heard against a crashing and cacophonous orchestra. To Rostropovich's friends and enthusiasts, the message was that of a free and unbowed musical and intellectual spirit struggling to make himself heard against the din of cultural orthodoxy and in spite of official censure of his behavior."

"They decided to suffocate me in 1965...You Westerners cannot imagine my situation. I live in my own country. I write a novel about Russia. But as hard for me to gather material as it would be if I were writing about Polynesia...A kind of forbidden, contaminated zone has been created around my family... The plan is either to drive me out of my life, or out of the country, to throw me into a ditch or to send me to Siberia, or to have me dissolve in an alien fog."

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