Quotations from Eight Twentieth-Century Russian Plays

Quotations from Eight Twentieth-Century Russian Plays

Victor Ardov's The Case of the Entry Room

A dog--is a person too, citizen Judge, heaven knows it has feelings too.

Of course, in the lean years I got it in exchange for flour--the billiard table.  And I traded only for the sake of the cloth, so that the whole family would have green clothes.

He's her husband, but last month they made as if they had divorced, so that each would get a room, and not have their space reduced.  But he's a husband to her.  He was her husband, and is still her husband.

Well, you see, maybe Pushkin spent a night in the room I occupy.  Her is the documentation.

Squaring the Circle:  A Vaudeville in Three Acts

Abraham:  As if we couldn't get along with without registering our marriage.  Who would we be hurting?
Tonya:  A concession to the petty bourgeoisie.

Abram:  What do you need for a stable marriage?  Compatible personalities, mutual understanding, class consciousness, a shared political orientation, and proletarian solidarity.

Abram:  I give you my Komsomol word that I'll try not to crowd you.

Tonya:  I don't understand these feudal sensitivities.

Abram:  Kuznetsova, cut the petty bourgeois nonsense.

Abram:  I always said that our work among nonmembers wasn't worth a damn.

Abram:  Aha! Kuznetsova, you here that?  There's a resolution on the table to have some tea and rolls.

Tonya:  Proletarians in solidarity don't act like that.

Tonya:  Don't forget I'm not your servant, but an autonomous companion in life and comrade in work.

Tonya: You have a feudal conception of marriage.

Abram:  No getting around it, this is a one hundred percent, honest-to-goodness feudal family squabble.

Abram:  I'm looking for a book on ethics.  Just wait, there's been a disaster.  Someone swiped it.

Abram:  There's something horribly feudal about a woman crying.

Vasya:  Do you love him or don't you?  Just tell the truth.
Tonya: I don't understand--what an ideological way of putting it...

Tonya:  If I may express myself in obsolete ideological terminology, comrade Abram is madly in love with me.

Tonya:  We'll have to forgo our individual interests in favor of the common interest.
Tasya:  What a drag...

Flavii:  Well, well, guys, show me your territory, demonstrate your technical accomplishments.  Just where do you live, exactly.

Flavii:  Who would have thought that such a serious young woman, with such a sound sociopolitical record, would be capable of such foolishness?

Abram:  A letter for me?  That's a rare historical event.  I haven't received a letter since 1917.

Quotations from Vladimir Kirshon's Grain

Olga:  I'm sick of this little town, with its age-old gloomy ignorance and only three hundred and eleven streetlamps to light it.

Mikhailov:  Well, what do you say--is there any chance of a revolution in the West?

Rayevsky:  It's impossible for the proletariat not to be victorious.  Victory is inevitable, like death. 

Kvasov:  Pashka, take the masters to the room.
Kayevsky:  What masters?  I used to dunk masters in the Black Sea.

Kvasov:  I've watered our earth with my own sweat and tears.  And so have you.  See, our earth is salty.  But in Moscow the cabdrivers feeds their horses baked bread.



Forms of Government or Organization

Residents' Associations
Young Pioneers
Komsomol
Regional Committee
Central Committee
Council of People's Commissars
Party Member
Comintern
Party
Kolkoz


Techniques of Government

Resolutions
Measures
Inspection Committees
Plans
Quotas
Decrees
Informers
Arrests
Official orders
Procurement
Taxes
Savings bonds
Voluntary contributions
Propaganda campaigns
Hostage-taking


Goals

Modernization
Industrialization
Secularization
Collectivization
Communal housing

Compliments

Hero of Labor
Order of the Red Banner
Citizen
Proletarian
Comrade
Class conscious

Insults

Feudal
Bourgeois
Petty Bourgeois
Bourgeois holdover
Kulak
Nonmembers
Decadent
Tsarist
White
Counterrevolutionary