Freedom begins with respect for others’ rights.
Moscow was an enormous city, but there was nowhere to go in it.
We forget everything. What we remember is not what actually happened, not history, but merely that hackneyed dotted line they have chosen to drive into our memories by incessant hammering.
Why is it that all the main work of breaking down human souls went on at night? Why, from their very earliest years, did the Organs select the night? Because at night, the prisoner torn from sleep, even though he has not yet been tortured by sleeplessness, lacks his normal daytime equanimity and common sense. He is more vulnerable.
And therein we find, neglected by us, the simplest, the most accessible key to our liberation: a personal nonparticipation in lies! Even if all is covered by lies, even if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way: Let their rule hold not through me!
We studied nature, whereas our brothers studied society. We’re still around; our brothers are no more. So who inherits the unfulfilled destiny of the elite in the humanities? Perhaps we do? If we don’t take a hand, who will?
They hung on to each other so closely that you’d think one would suffocate unless he breathed the same air as the other.
Does it bother you to wear a number? They don’t weigh anything, those numbers.
That wasn’t like spying. Any fool can spy. A spy has a clean, exciting life. But try and spend ten years in a hard labour camp!
In one of my prewar lectures – they were devilishly daring! – I developed this excerpt from Goethe into the elegiac idea that there is no such thing as happiness, that it is either unattainable or illusory. Then, suddenly, a note was passed to me, a page torn out of a miniature notebook – squared paper: “ ‘But I’m in love – and I am happy! What do you say to that?’ ” “What did you say?” “What can anybody say?
You can’t know everything in the world. Whatever happens you’ll die a fool.
She was wonderful, in spite of everything she was wonderful.
It was clearly a prisoner’s craftwork; that is, the most painstaking work in the world, for prisoners have nowhere to hurry to.
It was simply that we grow dull with the passing years. We grow tired. We lose all true talent for grief or for faithfulness. We surrender to time. Yet every day we swallow food and lick our fingers – in this respect we are unyielding. If we’re not fed for two days we go out of our minds, we start climbing up the wall. Fine progress we’ve made, we human beings.
In general, “we draw no distinction between intention and the crime itself, and this is an instance of the superiority of Soviet legislation to bourgeois legislation.
But substantial X-ray treatment is impossible without transfusion!” “Then don’t give it! Why do you assume you have the right to decide for someone else? Don’t you agree it’s a terrifying right, one that rarely leads to good? You should be careful. No one’s entitled to it, not even doctors.” “But doctors are entitled to that right – doctors above all,” exclaimed Dontsova with deep conviction. By now she was really angry. “Without that right there’d be no such thing as medicine!
Anna Akhmatova.
Spy mania was one of the fundamental aspects of Stalin’s insanity.
Derzhavin discovered that the Jewish schnapps distillers were exploiting the alcoholism of the peasants: “After I had discovered that the Jews while seeking profits, use the lure of drink to beguile grain from the peasants, convert it into brandy and thereby cause a famine, I commanded that they should close their distilleries in the village of Liosno.
No one, even as a joke, could call a member of the all-Union Communist Party a Neo-Hegelian, a Neo-Kantian, a Subjectivist, an Agnostic, or, God forbid, a Revisionist. But “epicurean” sounded so harmless it could not possibly imply that one was not an orthodox Marxist.