Quotes from Sergei Dovlatov's The Zone

Below are some of my favorite quotations from Sergei Dovlatov's The Zone

...any resemblance between the characters in this book and living people is intentional and malicious.  And all the fictionalizing was unexpected and accidental.





"I was a slender string in the thunderous concert of the war," Lieutenant Colonel Mar began.

By then I was a fully formed person, endowed with all sorts of oppressive complexes.

Having a living father might have given the impression of bourgeois excess.

My father was a sort of hidden treasure.  He paid alimony, but not very regularly.  This is natural.

All signs pointed to a typical Soviet biography. 

Love stories often end in prison.

In that world, I saw men with a gruesome past, a repulsive present and a tragic future.

I was friends with a man who had once upon a time pickled his wife and children in a barrel.

What had once seemed important receded into the background.  Trivialities blocked the horizon.

The heels of bread were comparable to diamond desposits.

"I got married," Marconi said in a tragic tone, and hung his head.
"Do I know her?"
"No.  I hardly know her myself.  You're not missing much."

In order to land in the penal isolator of a maximum-security camp, you had to commit some incredibly evil deed.  Strange as it may seem, many managed to do so.

A smile both absent-minded and anxious played constantly over his face.  An intellectual can always be recognized by that smile, even in the taiga.

Your thesis should be:  drink, but within limits.  Not drinking at all--that would be overkill.  That would be an anti-Marxist utopia, as they say. 

"Dzavashvili has a condom," Matstysn said.  "I saw."
"One?" Fidel asked.
"Oh look, a scholar!"  Volikov said, getting angry.  "This one needs his own private condom!  You'll wait your turn."

My only diversion is cigarettes.  I've learnt how to smoke in the shower.

...it's very important not to confuse harmony with indifference.

I begin with the cemetery because I am telling a love story. 

We were very similar to each other, and even interchangeable.  Almost any prisoner would have been suited to the role of a guard.  Almost any guard deserved a prison term.

These were people whose feuds and friendships didn't look much different.

"And I come from a long line of Russian thieves.  I have stolen and will again."