“The elaborate and rather flexible political police system established in Russia in the early 1880s was unique in at least two respects. Before the First World War no other country in the world had two kinds of police, one to protect the state and another to protect its citizens. Only a country with a deeply rooted patrimonial mentality could have devised such a dualism. Secondly, unlike other countries, where the police served as an arm of the law and was required to turn over all arrested persons to the judiciary, in imperial Russia and there alone police organs were exempt from this obligation.”
Quote by Richard Pipes
“By 1937 Soviet standards, mementos of Russian history before the 1917 revolution were irrelevant. Even the suggestion that china, jewelry, or furniture created for the imperial palaces of the tsars was worth more than its weight in gold might be construed as anti-Soviet propaganda.”
Source: American Empress: The Life and Times of Marjorie Merriweather Post
“His wife Anna’s presence can be felt everywhere in these final years of Dostoyevsky’s life: in his writings, his speeches, in the very fact of his physical survival.”
Source: The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky
“Standing quietly in the shade of the literary giant Dostoyevsky, his wife Anna is often erased from the historical record.”
Source: The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky
“His widow Anna dedicated most of her energy in her later years to shaping Dostoyevsky’s legacy and presenting it to the world.”
Source: The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky
“Dostoyevsky’s widow insisted that her husband was to literature what the physicist-founder of the X-ray was to the human body: the inventor of a wholly new means of peering inside the human soul.”
Source: The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky
“Beyond participating in Dostoevsky’s creative work as his stenographer, first reader, and editor, his wife Anna also controlled all other aspects of their publishing enterprise.”
Source: The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky
“Thus began Anna Dostoyevskaya’s career as Russia’s first sole woman publisher, a career that would in time wrest Dostoyevsky out of debt and continue to provide for their family for almost the next four decades.”
Source: The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky
“Russia is a country with unpredictable past.”
Source: Russia: Myths and Realities: The History of a Country with an Unpredictable Past
“Some people are born with an ear for music, some people are born with a talent for drawing, some people...have a built-in radar that tells them where a comma needs to go in a sentence.”
Source: Our Chemical Hearts
“But the glimmer of hope in Russia was not entirely extinguished by the atavism of the Putin years. The Japanese reinvented themselves in the 19th century and again after 1945, the Germans, the Spaniards and the Italians experimented with dictatorship and abandoned it. French, Spanish, German and Swedish armies terrorised Europe for centuries, then decided they preferred peace after all. The other Europeans gave up their empires and turned instead to liberal democracy. Only the most obstinate historical determinist would insist that Russians were uniquely incapable of shaking themselves free of the burden of history. By the 3rd decade of the 21st century Russian was already different from what it had been in Soviet times, it's huge size diminished by jet aircraft, modern communications and the internet. Its people by previous standards urban, educated, comparatively prosperous, free to travel, surprisingly well-informed, determined optimists might even hope that the shock of the Ukraine war would change the way Russians look at their past and perhaps make them more open to a different and more constructive future. One thing only was sure, Russia's future would be shaped by the Russian people themselves, regardless of the hopes, fears and wishful thinking of foreigners.”
Source: Russia: Myths and Realities: The History of a Country with an Unpredictable Past
