This post is a work in progress. I'll be adding favorite quotations related to Russia and the Soviet Union here from time to time.
Nina Berberova,from Alexsander Blok: A Life. “The history of Russia might be the evolution of boredom, transformed over centuries in its vast spaces, under the too-grey sky, into passivity, heavy cruelty, and laziness.”
Ivan Bunin. Quoting Chekhov. "You'll see, when Tolstoy dies, everything will go to the dogs." "You mean literature?" "Everything. Literature included."
Nabokov. The Gift. Koncheyev talking to Godunov-Cherdyntsev in imagined scene. “Don’t forget that the whole of Russian literature is the literature of one century and, after the most lenient eliminations, takes up no more than three to three and a half thousand printed sheets, and scarcely one half of this is worthy of the bookshelf, to say nothing of the bedside table. With such quantitative scantiness we must resign ourselves to the fact that our Pegasus is piebald, that not everything about a bad writer is bad, and not all about a good one good.”
Aleksander Blok. "What is darker wins."
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