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Russian Literature Quotes

Browse 102 quotes about Russian Literature.

Russian Literature 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.”

“Самое главное – это атмосфера и мгновения. Это – то прозрачное и величественное, что существует в жизни. И воспоминания состоят именно из этих мгновений, которые, как яркие вспышки, появляются среди мрака прошлого. Когда ты внезапно можешь осознать, что было важным для тебя в то далекое время. И эти воспоминания наполняют тебя сегодняшнего. И как волны бесконечного, движущегося моря памяти приходят на берег жизни. И ты начинаешь чувствовать себя свободным и бесконечным в своем путешествии по этому морю.”

“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.”

“¿Para qué ha y que molestar a la gente que se muera, si de muerte es el final normal y legítimo de todo? ¿Qué esl o que cambia si un triste comerciante o un funcionario vive unos cinco o diez años de más? Incluso si consideramos que el objeto de la medicina está en que los medicamentos alivian los sufrimientos, sin querer salta la pregunta: ¿para qué aliviarlos? En primer lugar, se dice que los sufrimientos abren al hombre el camino de la perfección, y en segundo lugar, si de verdad la humanidad aprendiese a aliviar sus sufrimientos con pastillas y gotas, entonces abandonaría definitivamente la religión y la filosofía, en las cuales ha encontrado hasta ahora no solo protección ante todo género de desgracias, sino incluso la felicidad." - El Pabellón N. 6”

“می دانید وقتی شما منکر همه چیز شدید، به زودی به عنوان یک آدم عاقل شهرت پیدا می کنید. نیرنگ خوبی است. مردم ساده لوح فورا نتیجه می گیرند که شما از آن چیزی که انکار می کنید برتر هستید. ولی اغلب این امر صحیح نیست. اولا شما ممکن است در هر چیزی عیبی پیدا کنید. در ثانی اگر حقیقت را هم بگویید برای خودتان بدتر است، زیرا وقتی عقل شما صرفا گرفتار نفی کردن باشد فقیر می شود و می خشکد. در عین اینکه حس خودخواهی خود را ارضا می کنید، از لذت واقعی تعمق و اندیشه محروم می شوید. زندگی- ماهیت زندگی- از اندیشه ی ناچیز و سودایی شما می گریزد و کار شما به این جا می کشد که عوعو کنید و مردم را بخندانید.”

“به گفته ی خود او، رغیت پیری به نام فدور لوبانف عشق به شعر را به او آموخت. در داستان کوتاه خود، پونین و بابورین، این دهقان ساده، با ذوق و صاحب زبان زیبا را توصیف می کند، با او روی علفها، در پشت آبگیر می نشست و دهقان با طمطراق اشعاری از خراسکوف و لومونوسوف را برایش از بر می خواند.”

“One of the most brilliant Russian writers of the twentieth century, Yevgeny Zamyatin belongs to the tradition in Russian literature represented by Gogol, Leskov, Bely, Remizov, and, in certain aspects of their work, also by Babel and Bulgakov. It is a tradition, paradoxically, of experimenters and innovators. Perhaps the principal quality that unites them is their approach to reality and its uses in art - the refusal to be bound by literal fact, the interweaving of reality and fantasy, the transmutation of fact into poetry, often grotesque, oblique, playful, but always expressive of the writer's unique vision of life in his own, unique terms.”

“Seeing that I would never manage to fall asleep, I arose, lit a candle, and after dressing went outside. Beneath the dull glow of the winter moon the snow glowed like pale blue china. The sidewalks sparkled weakly beneath the rays of the flickering street lamps; the benumbed streets slumbered forlornly. I walked, passing one corner after the other, and suddenly found myself on the edge of town. Further, beyond the square, an endless expanse began to glisten with a somber silverness. I stopped just before the gates. My intent gaze could distinguish nothing in the distant white expanse. Before me rose the imposing bank of the Volga like a gigantic snowdrift. So barren and uninviting was this deserted view resembling eternity that my heart contracted. I turned to the right and approached quite close to the monastery enclosure. From behind the bronze gates, glimmered a dense net of crosses and gravestones. The ancient eyes of the church gazed forbiddingly down on me, and with an eerie feeling I thought of the monks sleeping at this moment in tomb-like cells together with corpses. Were any of them thinking of the hour of death on this night? ("Lamia")”

“Tolstoi retrata y, al mismo tiempo, radiografía. Cuenta las perlas del collar con que adorna el pecho de la mujer que está imaginando. Nos percatamos, entonces, de que -a través de las perlas- la mirada del novelista penetró en la intimidad más recóndita de la dueña de aquel collar. Si intuición lo guía mucho mejor que el más fino psicólogo. Y lo que más sorprende es que el lector no descubre nunca el instante en que ha penetrado, sin darse cuenta, en la escena que está leyendo". p. 169”

“The great Russian literature is above all a literature of pessimism, more accurately of passive pessimism.... Russian passive pessimism educated the cadre of "superfluous people," or to put it more simply, parasites, "dreamers," people "without any given responsibilities," "whimperers," "grey little people" of the "twentieth rank.".... In contemporary Russian ethnographic romanticism such an idealization of past Razins and Pugachevs fuses with a sense of Russian "imperial" patriotism and obscures dreams concerning the future. It is incapable of going beyond this. The great Russian literature has reached its limit and has halted at the crossroads.... And the illiterate advice to found our orientation upon Muscovite art sounds like a malicious irony directed at the same Russian literature. By the will of history entirely the opposite will come to pass: Russian literature can only find the magical balm for its revival beneath the luxuriant, vital tree of the renaissance of young national republics, in the atmosphere of the springtime of once oppressed nations.”

“Remember, son, hunting is not for the fainthearted; a hunter never gets scared of blood or any animal, as he is an apex predator in the food web with heart and soul, loving the world and this taiga’. Around noon, he fixed me a quick lunch, and we waited for the bison hunt. For hours and hours, we waited for a lone bison when we spotted a herd of bison in Taiga.”

“Most British playwrights of my generation, as well as younger folks, apparently feel somewhat obliged to Russian literature - and not only those writing for theatres. Russian literature is part of the basic background knowledge for any writer. So there is nothing exceptional in the interest I had towards Russian literature and theatre. Frankly, I couldn't image what a culture would be like without sympathy towards Russian literature and Russia, whether we'd be talking about drama or Djagilev.”

“I think that Indian writing in English is a really peculiar beast. I can't think of any literature - perhaps Russian literature in the nineteenth century comes close - so exclusively produced by and closely identified with a tiny but powerful ruling elite, the upper-caste, Anglophone upper middle class, and dependent for so long on book buyers and readers elsewhere.”

“The Winter Woman is as wild as a blizzard, as fresh as new snow. While some see her as cold, she has a fiery heart under that ice-queen exterior. She likes the stark simplicity of Japanese art and the daring complexity of Russian literature. She prefers sharp to flowing lines, brooding to pouting, and rock and roll to country and western. Her drink is vodka, her car is German, her analgesic is Advil. The Winter Woman likes her men weak and her coffee strong. She is prone to anemia, hysteria, and suicide.”

“Of all my films, people wrote to me most about this one... ...I had wanted to make The Idiot long before Rashomon. Since I was little I've liked Russian literature, but I find that I like Dostoevsky the best and had long thought that this book would make a wonderful film. He is still my favourite author, and he is the one - I still think - who writes most honestly about human existence.”