Below are a few of my favorite quotations from Venedikt Erofeev's Walpurgis Night, or the Steps of the Commander
Gurevich: All territory is ours. Or rather, it will be. They just don't let us go there--something to do with peace-making, apparently. So we've made do with one-sixth of the inhabitable dry land.
Gurevich: Right now I've got a job at a hardware store. I'm their Tatar.
Zinaida Nikolaevna: How much to do they pee you?
Gurevich: They pay me exactly what my Homeland thinks right and proper.
Gurevich: The sharks won't back down, and eventually they lose their empty heads. Well, they did lick my girlfriend's calves in parting, but being jealous would have been ridiculous in that situation.
Doctor: What is today's date? The year? The month?
Gurevich: What's the difference? Days, millennia---that's all so trivial for Russia.
Doctor: Drinking is bad for your health, Lev Isakovich.
Gurevich: As if I didn't know. Telling me that now is like telling the Moor of Venice, say, who has just been shaken by his deed--like telling that crushing a windpipe and trachea can lead to paralysis of the expiatory center as a result of asphyxiation.
Gurevich: I'm opposed to all wars in general. War decimates soldiers, destroys ranks, and stains uniforms.
Gurevich: We are speaking about our Native Land and disaster. And so, I love Russia. It occupies one-sixth of my soul. Probably a little more now.
Every ordinary citizen should be a brave warrior, just as all regular urine should be a bright amber color.
Gurevich: Naturally, I'm ready to throw myself under any tank, with or without a strong of grenades.
Gurevich: ...Such a strong feeling..like being in your stepmother's womb.
Doctor: Well, well, well. That will do, patient. A madhouse is no place to show off how smart you are.
Doctor: Yes, yes, to be quite precise, that day an event occurred that etched itself in the memory of millions for five whole years. The same empty wine bottle that had cost 12 or 17 kopecks, depending on volume, that day, well, they all cost 20.
Gurevich: More than anything else, I felt the hostility of my bald uncle, an admirer of Lazar Kagonovich, bawdy jokes, and chicken soup. My towhead friend Edik brought me the poison, and he said the poison was foolproof and fast-acting. I poured it all into my uncle's chicken soup, and --wouldn't you know it?--exactly twenty-six years later he expired in terrible agony.
Gurevich: Not only that, this bosum was going to bargain away to the CIA a map of the Soviet Union's points of beverage purchase.
Borya: Prepare the sulfo for the patient. I'll give him the shot myself.
Prokhorov: What are you going to do. Boris? He's new here. It's the delirium of justice seeking, the sense of falsely understood honor, and other atavisms.
Prohkorov: Do you know that every Russian village has its idiot. What kind of a Russian village has is it without its village idiot? People would look at that village as they would at a Britain that still didn't have a single Constitution.
Prohkorov: No, the Russian nation does not want for zealots, and it never will!
Gurevich: Oh, my dear, why don't you understand? My hand shakes--so be it. How does vodka enter into it? Hands shake when the soul is homeless.
Gurevich: You've noticed how moral principles are deteriorating in the Russian nation. Even in the Baltics.
Seryozha: A pipeline to supply tear gas to Russia on mutually advantageous terms.
Kolya: Who in fact is the author of the gastro-intestinal tract?
Gurevich: It's all right. No surprise. We should put all our trust in fate and firmly believe that the worst is yet to come.
Gurevich: ..they're isolated: each has his own worry, his own rumbling in his belly. Whereas we share our worry and our rumbling!
Gurevich: Well, there's no point in pandering to Britain. Even Herodotus didn't believe in its existence. Why should we be any better or worse than Herodotus?
Prokhorov: And I personally saw a fine painting of Kutuzov, and he was riding a horse, I don't remember where, but he had two eyes.
Gurevich: That's the whole point. A Russian shouldn't be one-eyed. These here--they can allow themselves this luxury, all these Admiral Nelson-Rockefellers. But not us; we can't. The Universe's alarming situation obliges us to keep both eyes open. Yes,
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