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The First Circle

Book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 2 quotes · 1968, Prison, Gleb Nerzhin

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All1968PrisonGleb NerzhinPrison LifeSoviet UnionGulagHappinessIfsLifeMediocrityMenPeopleRussian LiteratureSacrificeSharashkaSkepticismSoaring To The Ceiling19th CenturyAbakumovAbundance

The First Circle Quotes

“...she knew from school that that sort of literature was boring: Gorky was correct but somehow ponderous; Mayakovsky was very correct but somehow awkward; Saltykov-Shchedrin was progressive, but you could die yawning if you tried to read him through; Turgenev was limited to his nobleman's ideals; Goncharov was associated with the beginnings of Russian capitalism; Lev Tolstoi came to favor patriarchal peasantry—and their teacher did not recommend reading Tolstoi's novels because they were very long and only confused the clear critical essays written about him. And then they reviewed a batch of writers totally unknown to anyone: Dostoyevsky, Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, and Sukhovo-Kobylin. It was true that one did not even have to remember the titles of their works. In all this long procession, only Pushkin shone like a sun.”

Literary CriticismRussian Literature1968Academic Education
Book:The First Circle
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“Nineteenth-century Russian literature, swooning with compassion for the suffering brother, had created for Nerzhin, and for everyone reading it for the first time, the image of a haloed, silvery-haired People, embodying all wisdom, moral purity, and spiritual grandeur. But that was far away, on bookshelves; it was somewhere else, in the villages and fields at the crossroads of the nineteenth century. The heavens unfolded, the twentieth century came, and those places had long since ceased to exist under Russian skies.”

19th CenturyRussian Literature1968The PeopleGleb Nerzhin
Book:The First Circle
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