Quotes from the Education of Lev Navrozoc

Below are some favorite quotations from The Education of Lev Navrozov

Czechoslovakia, twelve years after Hungary.  The time in Russia is clocked by her western periphery.

The pre-1917 generation surviving into the thirties was as defenseless as an old strain of microbes against a new antibiotic. 

"Let us live.  Everyone is unhappy.  Before 1953 everyone was happy. Then it became safe to be unhappy, and everyone became unhappy."

"These are not quite freedoms.  Rather leniencies.

"So many people are innocent, historically.  They are happy. They live.  Tell them you live in the Golden Horde.  They will not even understand."

"For every paranoia there is a superparanoia."

There were no Sundays at that time because Sunday in Russian means Resurrection.  So there were days off instead...

"We could live anywhere I liked, he said.  Except of course, Russia, impossible to settle in, and we laughed at the horror of Russia.  He was a comic figure from a comic country."

Why is it that in only in retrospect that life looks like life, and when you are within it, you can notice it no more than you can a cloud when you are within that cloud? 

In 1921 capitalism, that worse evil on earth for the elimination of which almost anything had to be endured, was invited to save the country, and the worst evil on earth did save it...

"But then everything was the state."
The state.  Masterdom.  What a word in Russian:  the adjective has fifteen letters--the very word is leviathan, its scales dully glimmering as it uncoils its five crustaceous syllables.

With the chief of the organs of state security Beria it was different:  the whole organ was his harem. 

The friend was a phony.  But communism is so theatrical, contradictory, and deceptive that it is hard for a communist to detect phoniness in a friend.

Yet the retreat was over in 1928, the society began to be rewarded, supplied, and inspected from the center, and hence the farther off the center, the more pauperized, lawless, and savage life became.

Nikolay Nikolayevich was included to suicide.  I do not say he had a suicidal mania, because he might have thought that it was trying to live that was a mania. 

Living space has influenced all social relations, and there have been marriages of living space, living-space crimes, and struggles for inches of living space more fierce perhaps than for multi-billion fortunes, chains of casinos, or colonies promising gold, ivory and spaces.

"You not-yet-knifed bourjuy"

When grain was taken away from them entirely free, it was called procurement, grain-procurement, or grain-proc for short.

Now there were no bed sheets at all.  We slept on rustling desk paper, but everyone who enters a greater degree of unfreedom in an infinite series of degrees of unfreedom must realize at once that he is in a new life, and no comparison with his former life is possible.

Unheard-of luck it was,  because I was not born under Sagitarius, the archer--I was born under the organization of the country's first machine and tractor station on the shevchenko state farm, odessa region.

When Ulyanov-Lenin still lived in Smolny of Petrograd-Petersburg, he wanted to start the elevator there.  But no stupendous exertion of his dialectical intellect could start it.  Evidently to create a new society and a new man is easier than to start an elevator.

By virtue of his rank, Ulyanov-Lenin was the highest incarnation of self-sacrifice.

After 1917 the populace was his property. 

There were portraits of great Lenin everywhere, but was this enough considering the greatness of his modesty?

The county unit of fewer than a million deaths simply ceased to exist after 1917. 

Not to write, but just to say something which one was not authorized to say was now a crime.

Torture was mentioned officially quite sparingly, while shooting was a good, pleasant, romantic word...