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The barbed wire of the camps, the clay of the anti-tank ditches and the walls of the gas ovens brought together millions of people of different ages, professions and languages, people with different material concerns and different spiritual beliefs. All of them – fanatical believers and fanatical atheists, workers and scroungers, doctors and tradesmen, sages and idiots, thieves, contemplatives, saints and idealists – were to be exterminated.
sententiously:
Given to moralizing in a Pompous or effected manner
No, no! Fear alone cannot achieve all this. It was the revolutionary cause itself that freed people from morality in the name of morality, that justified today’s pharisees, hypocrites and writers of denunciations in the name of the future, that explained why it was right to elbow the innocent into the ditch in the name of the happiness of the people.
Hunger weighs down the soul, drives away joy and faith, destroys thought and engenders submissiveness, base cruelty, indifference and despair.
Institute, Madyarov, or any of his fears and premonitions. All
How strange it was to walk down this long, straight corridor. Life itself was so confusing – with all its winding paths, its bogs, streams and ravines, its dust-covered steppes, its unharvested corn . . . You squeezed your way through or made long detours – but fate ran straight as an arrow. Just corridors and corridors and doors in corridors.
What’s your shell made out of, mister tortoise?” I said and looked him in the eye. “Just from the lessons fear has taught us.” Were the words of his reply.’
There is one right even more important than the right to send men to their death without thinking: the right to think twice before you send men to their death. Novikov carried out this responsibility to the full.
‘Lyuda,’ said Yevgenia, a reproachful note in her voice, ‘you remember only the worst about people and you always bring it up at the wrong moment.’ ‘What do you expect of me? I’ve always been one to call a spade a spade.’ ‘Fine,’ said Yevgenia, ‘but don’t imagine that’s always a virtue.’
‘You’ve got a difficult character, Lyuda. I can understand why Mama lives like a gypsy in Kazan instead of staying with you in your four-room flat.’
‘You don’t look well,’ said Viktor. ‘That’s what’s called a Jewish compliment.’
‘Zhenya, my dear,’ said Viktor, ‘you’ve acted according to your conscience. Believe me – that’s the highest thing a man can do. I don’t know what life has in store for you, but I’m sure of one thing: you listened to your conscience – and the greatest tragedy of our age is that we don’t listen to our consciences. We don’t say what we think. We feel one thing and do another.
All they ever spoke of was food and material things; the world they lived in had room only for objects. There were no human feelings in this world – nothing but boards, paint, millet, buckwheat, thirty-rouble notes.
There’s something ghastly about a monkey imitating the ways of a man . . . At the same time Krymov had a clear sense that he himself was no longer a human being – when had people ever had conversations like this in front of a third person . . . ? ‘Want a big fat kiss? No? Oh well . . .’
Every epoch has its own capital city, a city that embodies its will and soul. For several months of the Second World War this city was Stalingrad. The thoughts and passions of humanity were centred on Stalingrad. Factories and printing presses functioned for the sake of Stalingrad. Parliamentary leaders rose to their feet to speak of Stalingrad. But when thousands of people poured in from the steppes to fill the empty streets, when the first car engines started up, this world capital ceased to exist.
A world capital is unique not only because it is linked with the fields and factories of the whole world. A world capital is unique because it has a soul. The soul of wartime Stalingrad was freedom.
How strange man is. Viktor had found the strength to renounce life itself – and now he seemed unable to refuse candies and cookies.
He realized with sorrow and horror how incapable he was of protecting his own soul. The power that had reduced him to slavery lay inside him.
Good men and bad men alike are capable of weakness. The difference is simply that a bad man will be proud all his life of one good deed – while an honest man is hardly aware of his good acts, but remembers a single sin for years on end.
Yes, she admired the obstinate birds who went on singing no matter how bad the weather.
No, whatever life holds in store – hard-won glory, poverty and despair, or death in a labour camp – they will live as human beings and die as human beings, the same as those who have already perished; and in this alone lies man’s eternal and bitter victory over all the grandiose and inhuman forces that ever have been or will be . . .
