Soviet Literature Quotes

“Just forget for a minute that you have spectacles on your nose and autumn in your heart. Stop being tough at your desk and stammering with timidity in the presence of people. Imagine for one second that you raise hell in public and stammer on paper. You’re a tiger, a lion, a cat. You spend a night with a Russian woman and leave her satisfied. You’re twenty five. If rings had been fastened to the earth and sky, you’d have seized them and pulled the sky down to earth”
― Isaac Babel

“All women are lips, nothing but lips. Some pink, firmly round---a ring, a tender protection against the whole world. But these: a second ago they did not exist, and now--a knife slit--and the sweet blood will drip down.”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“She was arriving at a revelation that the secret to living was simply forgetting”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“In the First World War we lost in all about three million killed. In the Second we lost twenty million (soKhrushchevsaid; according toStalinit was only seven million. Was Nikita being too generous? Or couldn't Iosif keep track of his capital?) All those odes! All those obelisks and eternal flames! Those novels and poems! For a quarter of a century all Soviet literature has been drunk on that blood!”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

“Иногда читаешь хорошую книгу советского писателя — и вдруг натыкаешься на места, такие безвкусные, «идейные», что плюнуть хочется. Автор их дописывал, отлично зная, что они вызовут только недоумение и презрение читателя, но далеко не все читатели знают, что только такой ценой могло выйти в свет произведение. Особенно ярко это проявляется в книгах стихов. Они должны открываться стихами дежурно-идейными, которыми автор зарабатывает право поместить дальше уже и подлинную поэзию. Поэтому многие читатели начинают читать сборники стихов с конца, т. е. с лучшего [8].”
― Анатолий Кузнецов, Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel

“Я пытался писать обыкновенный роман по методу социалистического реализма — единственному, который я знал, которому учили со школьной парты и далее всю жизнь. Но правда жизни, превращаясь в «правду художественную», почему-то на глазах тускнела, становилась банальной, гладенькой, лживой и, наконец, подлой.

Социалистический реализм обязывает писать не столько так, как было, сколько так, как это должно было быть, или, во всяком случае, могло быть. Ложный и лицемерный этот и метод, собственно, и загубил великую в прошлом русскую литературу. Я отказываюсь от него навсегда [11—12].”
― Анатолий Кузнецов, Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel

“Our communists aren’t like your communists. In New York they’re always on the street demonstrating, but their demands are absurd. Slash rents! Free groceries and electricity for the poor! They demand that landlords open up their vacant apartments to house the unemployed. They even demand that the Communist Party distribute unemployment relief instead of the Labor Department. They might as well demand cake and champagne!”
― Sana Krasikov

“Moscow appeared to her as an Asiatic sprawl of twisting streets, wooden shanties, and horse cabs. But already another Moscow was rising up through the chaos of the first. Streets built to accommodate donkey tracks have been torn open and replaced with boulevards broader than two or three Park Avenues. On the sidewalks, pedestrians were being detoured onto planks around enormous construction pits. A smell of sawdust and metal filings hung in the air”
― Sana Krasikov

“The Bolshevik leaders perched atop the Mausoleum were no easier to tell apart than chess pawns. But Florence too was certain that she could recognise the twinkling eyes of Joseph Stalin, which looked down at her each workday from the oil painting above Timofeyev’s desk”
― Sana Krasikov

“Florence, listen to me carefully. He squeezed her hand. Take whatever that agent offers you. Give him what he wants, and don’t ask too many questions. Get yourself an exit visa as soon as you can. Then leave! Disappear. Forget this wretched place”
― Sana Krasikov

“Sunset was just then settling over Red Square. There seemed some hidden vision to be gleaned. A message about man’s chaotic spirit and his sombre dignity. His dignity and his power. His power and his purpose. She was sure that there was some thread there, but the burden of decoding it made her feel too tired”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“A Red Riding Hood out of her depths in the woods of socialism”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“Who is she, after all? Not a member of the Party. Not even a Russian...What can she do, really, but watch the ginger-haired sacrificial lamb get slaughtered? One wrong move and Florence herself might be on the chopping block herself”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“Yes, there will be winter, there will be cold, there will be snowstorms, but then there will be spring again...”
― Chingiz Aitmatov

“The immediate difficulty, Florence realised while riding the high rail back to Brooklyn, was how to break the news to her parents, even if she could convince them that being a chaperone to six foreign men was a legitimate occupation for a twenty-three-year-old girl. What choice did she have? A paycheck could not win a girl’s independence”
― Sana Krasikov

“Sergey described the mighty furnaces and plants rising up from the steppes. “How far we’ve come. How much work there is still to do!” She would have to see it herself one day, with her own eyes. Florence reread the last line with a turbulent flip in her stomach. Was this an invitation?”
― Sana Krasikov

“Florence imagined the Hammer and Sickle metallurgical plant to be an enormous brick factory like the ones in New York. But as she approached she saw it was in fact a small city of its own”
― Sana Krasikov

“Their courtship unfolded in two settings, a Russian reality overlaid with New York memories”
― Sana Krasikov

“From the moment Julian entered the world, Florence had begun to conceive of life as separate from the aspects of its outward circumstances. Over and over, life renewed itself. Over and over, it made itself blind to the death and destruction of the past”
― Sana Krasikov

“My mother had been in the Soviet whirlpool for eleven years by this point. Enough time, I imagine, to unlearn the bourgeois habits of her native Brooklyn, to accustom herself to the farting and shouting of her neighbours, to doing her washing by hand in the collective tub, to keeping her dry food locked up in her wardrobe”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“Was it an instinct towards their future life together that she was already sensing, which made her pull back? For what she was seeing suddenly, in her mind’s eye, was an image of the two of them dancing on the edge of the world, not realising that they were about to fall off”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“Only then, as she prepared to cross the avenue, did she again spot the man in the fedora hat. He was at the opposite side of the street from where he’d stood before, but the caramel color of his coat was unmistakable. He was loitering in front of what looked like a Ford V8 parked nose-up on the sidewalk. Florence adjusted her shawl over her shoulders and crossed to the opposite corner of the plaza. When she turned back to look again, he was gone”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“Florence could feel a constriction in her chest…She had been foolish enough to hope that whatever she was walking into would affect no one but herself. Now the truth was catching up with her at the speed of her galloping heartbeat…Now they had summoned her. And they knew everything”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“Florence, listen to me carefully.... Take whatever that agent offers you. Give him what he wants, and don’t ask too many questions. Get yourself an exit visa as soon as you can. Then leave! Disappear. Forget this wretched place”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots