Quotes by Russian Authors

It is interesting to ponder the fact that there is no real difference between what the Western Fascists wanted of literature and what the Bolsheviks want. Let me quote: "The personality of the artist should develop freely and without restraint. One thing, however, we demand: acknowledgement of our creed.” Thus spoke one of the big Nazis, Dr. Rosenberg, Minister of Culture in Hitler's Germany. Another quote: “Every artist has the right to create freely; but we, Communists, must guide him according to plan.” Thus spoke Lenin. Both of these are textual quotations, and their similitude would have been highly diverting had not the whole thing been so very sad.
Vladimir Nabokov
Lebedev: ...There'll be a scandal, the tongues of the whole district will buzz with gossip, but it's better to go through a scandal, isn't it, than to destroy yourself for your whole life.
Anton Chekhov
One of the characters in our story, Gavril Ardalionovitch Ivolgin, belonged to the other category; he belonged to the category of "much cleverer" people; though head to toe he was infected with the desire to be original. But this class of person, as we have observed above, is far less happy than the first. The difficulty is that the intelligent "ordinary" man, even if he does imagine himself at times (and perhaps all his life) a person of genius and originality, nevertheless retains within his heart a little worm of doubt, which sometimes leads the intelligent man in the end to absolute despair. If he does yield in this belief, he is still completely poisoned with inward-driven vanity.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
A cultivated and decent man cannot be vain without setting a fearfully high standard for himself, and without despising and almost hating himself at certain moments.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
was coming to that troubled twilight time, a time of regrets that resemble hopes, of hopes that resemble regrets, when youth is past but old age has not yet come.
Ivan Turgenev
Comrades in the struggle! The position of modern man is not merely lamentable; one might even say that there is no condition, because man hardly exists. Nothing exists to which one could point and say: 'There, that is Homo Zapiens.' HZ is simply the residual luminescence of a soul fallen asleep; it is a film about the shooting of another film, shown on a television in an empty house.
Victor Pelevin
Attaining consciousness is connected with the gradual liberation from mechanicalness, for man is fully and completely under mechanical laws.
P.D. Ouspensky
To sit indoors was silly. I postponed the search for Savchenko and Ludmila till the next day and went wandering about Paris. The men wore bowlers, the women huge hats with feathers. On the café terraces lovers kissed unconcernedly - I stopped looking away. Students walked along the boulevard St. Michel. They walked in the middle of the street, holding up traffic, but no one dispersed them. At first I thought it was a demonstration - but no, they were simply enjoying themselves. Roasted chestnuts were being sold. Rain began to fall. The grass in the Luxembourg gardens was a tender green. In December! I was very hot in my lined coat. (I had left my boots and fur cap at the hotel.) There were bright posters everywhere. All the time I felt as though I were at the theatre.
Ilya Ehrenburg
the drama below and the drama above could easily collide at any moment
Ana Chapman
The State is not God. It has not the right to take away what it cannot restore when it wants to.
Anton Chekhov
So, take the idea of "rights" and drip some acid on it. Even the most adult of the Ancients knew: the source of a right is power, a right is a function of power. Take two trays of a weighing scale: put a gram on one, and on the other, put a ton. On one side is the "I", on the other is the "WE", the One State. Isn't it clear? Assuming that "I" has the same "rights" compared to the State is exactly the same thing as assuming that a gram can counterbalance a ton. Here is the distribution: a ton has rights, a gram has duties. And this is the natural path from insignificance to greatness: forget that you are a gram, and feel as though you are a millionth part of the ton...
Yevgeny Zamyatin
In recent months, the emotional aspect has become as necessary to me as the physical. It amuses me, this strange quirk of mine. I want my little captive to love me, to care about me. I want to be more than just the monster of her nightmares.
Anna Zaires
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.My sin, my soul.
Vladimir Nabokov
and I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else. She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past; an echo on the brink of a russet ravine, with a far wood under a white sky, and brown leaves choking the brook, and one last cricket in the crisp weeds... but thank God it was not that echo alone that I worshipped. What I used to pamper among the tangled vines of my heart, mon grand pch radieux, had dwindled to its essence: sterile and selfish vice, all that I cancelled and cursed. You may jeer at me, and threaten to clear the court, but until I am gagged and halfthrottled, I will shout my poor truth. I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another’s child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine; Changeons de vie, ma Carmen, allons vivre quelque, part o nous ne serons jamais spars; Ohio? The wilds of Massachusetts? No matter, even if those eyes of hers would fade to myopic fish, and her nipples swell and crack, and her lovely young velvety delicate delta be tainted and torneven then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the mere sound of your raucous young voice, my Lolita.
Vladimir Nabokov
In my opinion it is not the writer's job to solve such problems as God, pessimism, etc; his job is merely to record who, under what conditions, said or thought what about God or pessimism. The artist is not meant to be a judge of his characters and what they say; his only job is to be an impartial witness. I heard two Russians in a muddled conversation about pessimism, a conversation that solved nothing; all I am bound to do is reproduce that conversation exactly as I heard it. Drawing conclusions is up to the jury, that is, the readers. My only job is to be talented, that is, to know how to distinguish important testimony from unimportant, to place my characters in the proper light and speak their language.
Anton Chekhov
What if it turns out there really are witches and vampires and werewolves living right here alongside us? After all, what better disguise could there be than to get your image enshrined in the culture of the mass media? Anything that's described in artistic terms and shown in the movies stops being frightening and mysterious. For real horror you need the spoken word, you need an old grandpa sitting on a bench, scaring the grandkids in the evening: 'And then the Master of the house came to him and said: "I won't let you go, I'll tie you up and bind you tight and you'll rot under the fallen branches!"' That's the way to make people wary of anomalous phenomena! Kids sense that, you know–it's no wonder they love telling stories about the Black Han and the Coffin on Wheels. But modern literature, and especially the movies, it all just dilutes that instinctive horror. How can you feel afraid of Dracula, if he's been killed a hundred times? How can you be afraid of aliens, if our guys always squelch them? Yes, Hollywood is the great luller of human vigilance. A toast–to the death of Hollywood, for depriving us of a healthy fear of the unknown!
Sergei Lukyanenko
And just as he had tried, on the southern beach, to find again that unique rounded black pebble with the regular little white belt, which she had happened to show him on the eve of their last ramble, so now he did his best to look up all the roadside items that retained her exclamation mark: the special profile of a cliff, a hut roofed with a layer of silvery-gray scales, a black fir tree and a footbridge over a white torrent, and something which one might be inclined to regard as a kind of fatidic prefiguration: the radial span of a spider’s web between two telegraph wires that were beaded with droplets of mist. She accompanied him: her little boots stepped rapidly, and her hands never stopped moving, moving—to pluck a leaf from a bush or stroke a rock wall in passing—light, laughing hands that knew no repose. He saw her small face with its dense dark freckles, and her wide eyes, whose pale greenish hue was that of the shards of glass licked smooth by the sea waves.
Vladimir Nabokov
In general, dividing literature into prose and poetry began with the appearance of prose, for only in prose could such a division be expressed. By its nature, by its essence, art is hierarchical, automatically, and in this hierarchy, poetry stands above prose. If only because poetry is older. Poetry really is a very strange thing, because it belongs to a troglodyte as well as to a snob. It can be produced in the Stone Age and in the most modern salon, whereas prose requires a developed society, a developed structure, certain established classes, if you like. Here you could start reasoning like a Marxist without even being wrong. The poet works from the voice, from the sound. For him, content is not as important as is ordinarily believed. For a poet, there is almost no difference between phonetics and semantics. Therefore, only very rarely does the poet give any thought to who in fact comprises his audience. That is, he does so much more rarely than the prose writer.
Joseph Brodsky
...all this convinced him that he had come to one of those revolting havens where pathetic depravity makes its abode, born of tawdry education and the terrible populousness of the capital. One of those havens where man blasphemously crushes and derides all the pure and holy that adorns life, where woman, the beauty of the world, the crown of creation, turns into some strange, ambiguous being, where, along with purity of soul, she loses everything feminine and repulsively adopts all the mannerisms and insolence of a man, and ceases to be that weak, that beautiful being so different from us.
Nikolai Gogol
Please never despise the translator. He's the mailman of human civilization.
Alexander Pushkin
My own experience is that once a story has been written one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying . . . one must ruthlessly suppress everything that is not concerned with the subject. If in the first chapter you say there is a gun hanging on the wall you should make quite sure that it is going to be used further on in the story.
Anton Chekhov
You cannot write in the chimney with charcoal.
Russian proverb
Needless fear and panic over disease or misfortune that seldom materialize are simply bad habits. By proper ventilation and illumination of the mind it is possible to cultivate tolerance poise and real courage.
Elie Metchnikoff
Success depends in a very large measure upon individual initiative and exertion and cannot be achieved except by a dint of hard work.
Anna Pavlova
Originality and the feeling of one's own dignity are achieved only through work and struggle.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Work is the inevitable condition of human life the true source of human welfare.
Leo Tolstoy
Imposing limitations on yourself is cowardly because it protects you from having to try and perhaps failing.
Vladimir Zworykin
Regard the society of women as a necessary unpleasantness of social life and avoid it as much as possible.
Leo Tolstoy
Women can do everything men can do the rest.
Russian proverb
The weak against the strong Is always in the wrong.
Ivan Krylov
Every woman dreams of her own political career and her own place in life.
Raisa M. Gorbachev
By becoming more unhappy we sometimes learn how to be less so.
Madame Swetchine
In every generation there has to be some fool who will speak the truth as he sees it.
Boris Pasternak
No one can bar the road to truth and to advance its cause I'm ready to accept even death.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth. I can know only what the truth is for me today. That is what I am called upon to serve.
Igor Stravinsky
Heirlooms we don't have in our family. But stories we've got.
Rose Chernin
Youth is after all just a moment but it is the moment the spark that you always carry in your heart.
Raisa M. Gorbachev
Posterity will say as usual: "In the past things were better the present is worse than the past."
Anton Chekhov
I have a simple principle for the conduct of life - never to resist an adequate temptation.
Max Lerner
Conciseness is the sister of talent.
Anton Chekhov
Talent is always conscious of its own abundance and does not object to sharing.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Despite the success cult men are most deeply moved not by the reaching of the goal but by the grandness of effort involved in getting there-or failing to get there.
Max Lerner
Fools take to themselves the respect that is given to their office. Aesop It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
There is no greatness where there is not simplicity.
Leo Tolstoy
I like American women. They do things sexually Russian girls would never dream of doing - like showering.
Yakov Smirnoff
I am a moonbeam free to go whenever I choose.
Marina Tsvetaeva
It is what you are inside that matters. You yourself are your only real capital.
Vladimir Zworykin
I shall be an autocrat that's my trade and the good Lord will forgive me that's his.
Catherine the Great
Awakening begins when a man realizes that he is going nowhere and does not know where to go.
Georges Gurdjieff
Old age is that night of life as night is the old age of day. Still night is full of magnificence and for many it is more brilliant than the day.
Anne-Sophie Swetchine
Our vanity is the constant enemy of our dignity.
Anne-Sophie Swetchine
If you want to be respected by others the great thing is to respect yourself.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
You can enjoy encouragement coming from outside but you cannot need for it to come from outside.
Vladimir Zworykin
A show of envy is an insult to oneself.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
There is more than a mere suspicion that the scientist who comes to ask metaphysical questions and turns away from metaphysical answers may be afraid of those answers.
Gregory Zilboorg
We deceive ourselves when we fancy that only weakness needs support. Strength needs it far more.
Anne-Sophie Swetchine
I am one of those people who can't help getting a kick out of life-even when it's a kick in the teeth.
Polly Adler
Providence has hidden a charm in difficult undertakings which is appreciated only by those who dare to grapple with them.
Anne-Sophie Swetchine
If one is forever cautious can one remain a human being?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
It is impossible to predict the time and progress of revolution. It is governed by its own more or less mysterious laws. But when it comes it moves irresistibly.
Vladimir Lenin