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‘Je comprends tout ce que vous dites, je ne comprends pas seulement pourquoi vous dites cela
During the final year, however, he had been converted to the teachings of Tolstoy;
He had known, however, that if he opposed the Party in any one of these matters, he would turn out, against his will, to have opposed the very cause to which he had devoted his life: the cause of Lenin.
‘Grandmother’s not an egoist, she’s a populist,’ said Nadya, and added, ‘Populists are good people, but not very intelligent.’
Ukrainian borscht with haricot beans;
He wasn’t in the least worried or frightened at the thought of the new job he was about to begin. He had taken on many new jobs, and had never had difficulty in finding the correct line to follow. He knew it would be the same in the tank corps. But how could he reconcile his unshakeable, iron severity with this limitless tenderness and love?
Suddenly the sun rose – like a burst of hope. The dark autumn water mirrored the sky; it began to breathe and the sun seemed to cry out in the waves. The steep banks had been salted by the night’s frost and the red-brown trees looked very gay. The wind rose, the mist vanished and the world grew cool and glass-like, piercingly transparent. There was no warmth in the sun, nor in the blue sky and water.
‘SHAPOSHN’ was written in big letters, while ‘IKOV’ was written very small, each letter clinging to the one before. She had no thoughts and no will. She had nothing.
‘What about you, Borya? I suppose you want to be off to Berdichev, your very own Jewish capital,’ said Solomatin.
And next to him, all around him, the camp slept, heavily, noisily and uglily; the thick, stifling air was full of snores, sleepy cries, protracted groans and the sound of teeth being ground together.
The time had come for National Socialism to realize its cruellest designs against human life and freedom. It is a lie that it was the pressures of the war that forced the Fascist leaders to undertake these measures. On the contrary, danger and a lack of confidence in their own power were what most served to restrain and temper them. If Fascism should ever be fully assured of its final triumph, the world will choke in blood. If the day ever dawns when Fascism is without armed enemies, then its executioners will know no restraint: the greatest enemy of Fascism is man.
Before
This chapter analyses the psychology of the masses of victims who obediently assisted with their own destruction
The first half of the twentieth century may be seen as a time of great scientific discoveries, revolutions, immense social transformations and two World Wars. It will go down in history, however, as the time when – in accordance with philosophies of race and society – whole sections of the Jewish population were exterminated. Understandably, the present day remains discreetly silent about this.
What does this tell us? That a new trait has suddenly appeared in human nature? No, this obedience bears witness to a new force acting on human beings. The extreme violence of totalitarian social systems proved able to paralyse the human spirit throughout whole continents.
The violence of a totalitarian State is so great as to be no longer a means to an end; it becomes an object of mystical worship and adoration.
A frown suddenly appeared on his face. ‘Quite frankly,’ he went on angrily, ‘all this makes me want to vomit. In the name of the friendship of nations we keep sacrificing the Russians. A member of a national minority barely needs to know the alphabet to be appointed a people’s commissar, while our Ivan, no matter if he’s a genius, has to “yield place to the minorities”. The great Russian people’s becoming a national minority itself. I’m all for the friendship of nations, but not on these terms. I’m sick of it!’
What an extraordinary time this was! Krymov felt that history had left the pages of books and come to life.
When a man is plunged up to his neck into the cauldron of war, he is quite unable to look at his life and understand anything; he needs to take a step back. Then, like someone who has just reached the bank of a river, he can look round: was he really, only a moment ago, in the midst of those swirling waters?
Their commander, Lieutenant Zubarev, had studied singing at the Conservatory before the war. Sometimes he crept up to the German lines at night and began singing ‘Don’t Wake Me, Breath of Spring’, or one of Lensky’s arias from Eugene Onegin. If anyone asked why he risked his life to sing among heaps of rubble, he wouldn’t answer. It may have been from a desire to prove – to himself, to his comrades and even to the enemy – that life’s grace and charm can never be erased by the powers of destruction, even in a place that stank day and night of decaying corpses.
Anna Naumovna’s habit of recounting all her dealings with her landlady in insufferable detail.
There were people in whose presence Viktor found it hard to say even one word; his voice would go wooden and the conversation would become grey and colourless – as though they were both deaf-mutes. There were people in whose presence even one sincere word sounded false. And there were old friends in whose presence he felt peculiarly alone.
Viktor himself, like many people brought up in a cultured, bookish environment, enjoyed dropping phrases like ‘a load of crap’ or ‘bullshit’ into a conversation.
to accept the anger of the State as other people accept the anger of Nature or the anger of God.
He said – and no one had said this before, not even Tolstoy – that first and foremost we are all of us human beings. Do you understand? Human beings! He said something no one in Russia had ever said. He said that first of all we are human beings – and only secondly are we bishops, Russians, shopkeepers, Tartars, workers.
True believers always want to bring God to man by force; and in Russia they stop at nothing – even murder – to achieve this. ‘Chekhov said: let’s put God – and all these grand progressive ideas – to one side. Let’s begin with man; let’s be kind and attentive to the individual man – whether he’s a bishop, a peasant, an industrial magnate, a convict in the Sakhalin Islands or a waiter in a restaurant. Let’s begin with respect, compassion and love for the individual – or we’ll never get anywhere. That’s democracy, the still unrealized democracy of the Russian people.
‘The Russians have seen everything during the last thousand years – grandeur and super-grandeur; but what they have never seen is democracy.
‘She’s a splendid woman,’ thought Viktor. ‘If only her nose wasn’t always so red.’
‘There’s something very surprising,’ he suddenly said, ‘about novels portraying the foreign intelligentsia. I’ve just been reading Hemingway. When his characters have a serious conversation, they are always drinking. Cocktails, whisky, rum, cognac, more cocktails, more cognac, still more different brands of whisky. Whereas the Russian intelligentsia has always had its important discussions over a glass of tea. The members of “People’s Will”, the Populists, the Social Democrats all came together over glasses of weak tea. Lenin and his friends even planned the Revolution over a glass of weak
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To someone travelling by jeep, on tyres filled with the smoky air of the city, everything here blurs into a uniform grey . . . This Kalmyk steppe, which stretches, gradually changing to desert, right to the mouth of the Volga and the shores of the Caspian, has one strange characteristic: the earth and the sky above have reflected one another for so long that they have finally become undistinguishable, like a husband and wife who have spent their whole lives together.
But there is another, unexpected side to the steppe. It is also a noble, ancient world; a world where there are no screaming colours or harsh lines, but only a sober grey-blue melancholy that can rival the colours of a Russian forest in autumn; a world whose soft undulating hills capture the heart more surely than the peaks of the Caucasus; a world whose small, dark, ancient lakes seem to express the very essence of water more truly than seas or oceans.
‘All right. But why’ve you decided to leave us so suddenly?’ ‘Do you know what I’ve just heard? The foundations we’ve been digging are for gas ovens. Today we began pouring the concrete.’
The other prisoners were always repeating the word ‘Stalingrad’. Like it or not, the fate of the world hung on that city.
A young Englishman had made a victory sign and said: ‘I’m praying for you all. Stalingrad’s halted the avalanche.’
‘Que dois-je faire, mio padre?’ he asked. ‘Nous travaillons dans una Vernichtungslager.’
Although he appeared to feel indifferent about everything, one night he’d just lain there and cried. Yershov had asked what was the matter. After a long time he had replied very quietly: ‘I’m sad about Russia.’
No need, comrade, in this unceasing pain Of yours to call for help. Strange, but it’s you I call to help me, to warm my hands again. Yes, on your still warm blood I’ll warm mine too . . . So do not worry, do not weep or bleed! Nothing can harm you now that you are dead. Can you help me? There’s one thing I still need – Your boots . . . There are still battles ahead.
‘Who knows?’ said Yershov. ‘If you don’t want to smell, you shouldn’t touch shit.
When people in the rear see fresh troops being moved up to the Front, they feel a sense of joyful expectation: these gun batteries, these freshly-painted tanks seem to be the ones destined to strike the decisive blow, the blow that will bring about a quick end to the war.
Novikov’s tank corps was on its way to the Front. The naïve young soldiers, men who had not yet received their baptism of fire, believed they were the ones who would take part in the decisive operation.
Like every soldier on a journey, he was afraid he had been left behind.
The thunder of steel wheels on steel rails,
The new theory was not derived from experience. Viktor could see this quite clearly. It had arisen in absolute freedom; it had sprung from his own head.
asked him about the ten years without right of correspondence that thousands of people were sentenced to in 1937. He said he’d been in dozens of camps but he hadn’t met one person with that sentence. “Then what’s happened to all those people?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he answered, “but they’re not in the camps.”’
The air was thick and heavy, almost unbreathable. Everything that lies half-buried in almost every family, stirring up now and then only to be smoothed over by love and trust, had now come to the surface. There it had spread out to fill their lives. It was as though there were nothing between father, mother and daughter save misunderstanding, suspiciousness, resentment and anger.
Lord, Lord, it was over at last. The enemy had been halted.
Didn't Seemike that last time I visited the house at 6/1 …
He remembered the night after he had read the letter from his mother that had been brought by Colonel Novikov;
On their return from evacuation, the University staff met in one of the halls of the Academy of Sciences. All these people – young and old, pale or bald, with large eyes or small piercing eyes, with wide foreheads or narrow foreheads – were conscious, as they came together, of the highest poetry of all, the poetry of prose.
But there is room for argument as regards your evaluation of Einstein: it does seem inappropriate to regard an idealist theory as the peak of scientific achievement.’
idealism
Mentioned earlier w Einstein
One might have expected this quarrel to be forgotten as easily as their previous quarrels. But for some reason this particular flare-up was not forgotten. If two men’s lives are in harmony, they can quarrel, be wildly unjust to one another and then forget it. But if there is some hidden discord, then any thoughtlessness, any careless word, can be a blade that severs their friendship. Such discord often lies so deep that it never reaches the surface, never becomes conscious. One violent, empty quarrel, one unkind word, appears then to be the fateful blow that destroys years of friendship. No,
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