Now for the first time you were about to see people who were not your enemies. Now for the first time you were about to see others who were alive, who were traveling your road, and whom you could join to yourself with the joyous word “we.
But now, as he paced up and down the ward, he remembered how the old folk used to die back home on the Kama – Russians, Tartars, Votyaks or whatever they were. They didn’t puff themselves up or fight against it or brag that they weren’t going to die – they took death calmly. They didn’t stall squaring things away, they prepared themselves quietly and in good time, deciding who should have the mare, who the foal, who the coat and who the boots.
How old were you then?” “Fourteen.” “Do you remember anything about it?” “Very little.” “You don’t remember? It was like an earthquake. Apartment doors were flung wide open, people went in and took things and left. No one asked any questions. They deported a quarter of the city. Don’t you remember?” “Yes, I do. But the shameful thing is, at the time it didn’t seem the most important thing in the world. They explained it to us at school – why it was necessary, why it was expedient.
All history is one continuous pestilence. There is no truth and there is no illusion. There is nowhere to appeal and nowhere to go.
We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying. We also know that they know we know they are lying too. They of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. In our country, the lie has not just become a moral category, but the pillar industry of this country.
A submissive sheep is a find for a wolf.
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, races or creeds, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.
Shukhov stared at the ceiling and said nothing. He no longer knew whether he wanted to be free or not... it had gradually dawned on him that people like himself were not allowed to go home but were packed off into exile. And there was no knowing where the living was easier – here or there. The one thing he might want to ask God for was to let him go home. But they wouldn’t let him go home.
A prisoner five years between the shafts never hurries. He knows that what comes next can only be worse.
Just as a star suddenly flares to a hundred times its previous brightness – and then fades away, so, too, a human being not disposed to be a political may nonetheless flare up briefly and intensely in prison and perish as a result. Ordinarily we do not learn about these cases. Sometimes there is a witness to tell about them. Sometimes there is merely a faded piece of paper in front of us on which we can only build hypothesis;.
Even a strong man had no way left him to fight the prison machine, except perhaps suicide. But is suicide really resistance? Isn’t it actually submission?
You’re a member of the collective! You’re a member of the collective!’ That’s right. But only while he’s alive. When the time comes for him to die, we release him from the collective. He may be a member, but he has to die alone. It’s only he who is saddled with the tumor, not the whole collective.
Oleg had learned a lesson. This was his reward for not hurrying. The lesson was – never rush on without looking around first.
Wherever they went – Moscow, Tehran, the Syrian coast, Switzerland – a furnished house, villa, or apartment awaited the young couple. And their philosophies of life were the same: “We have only one life!” So take everything life can give, except one thing: the birth of a child. For a child is an idol who sucks dry the juices of your being without any return for your sacrifices, not even ordinary gratitude.
Of course their turn will come. There is a destructive force in prosperity. To prolong it for a year, a day, a man will sacrifice not only all that belongs to others but all that is sacred. He will defy the dictates of common prudence.
All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the Twentieth century’s moral poverty which no one could imagine even as late as in the Nineteenth Century.
He could barely stand, the Captain, but he kept on going. Shukhov had an old horse like that at home once. He took good care of that old horse, but he worked himself to death. And then they skinned the hide off him.
I have absorbed into myself my own eleven years there not as something shameful nor as a nightmare to be cursed: I have come almost to love that monstrous world, and now, by a happy turn of events, I have also been entrusted with many recent reports and letters. So perhaps I shall be able to give some account of the bones and flesh of that salamander – which, incidentally, is still alive.
On the great Belomor Canal even an automobile was a rarity. Everything was created, as they say in camp, with ‘fart power’.
The majority of the Greeks ended up in Central Asian exile; those who voiced their discontent were thrown into political prisons.