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COUNT ALEXANDER ILYICH ROSTOV
I have lived under the impression that a man’s purpose is known only to God.
several duly goateed officers of the current regime determined that for the crime of being born an aristocrat, I should be sentenced to spend the rest of my days . . . in this hotel.”
in September of 1905 that the members of the Delegation had signed the Treaty of Portsmouth to end the Russo-Japanese War. In the seventeen years since the making of that peace—hardly a generation—Russia had suffered a world war, a civil war, two famines, and the so-called Red Terror. In short, it had been
if a man does not master his circumstances then he is bound to be mastered by them.
But imagining what might happen if one’s circumstances were different was the only sure route to madness.
Michel de Montaigne!
Having acknowledged that a man must master his circumstances or otherwise be mastered by them,
Without a doubt, it was a book for when the birds had flown south, the wood was stacked by the fireplace, and the fields were white with snow; that is, for when one had no desire to venture out and one’s friends had no desire to venture in.
sadness is an emotion best shared. Or kept to oneself.
1905 revolution,
For the times do, in fact, change. They change relentlessly. Inevitably.
But Fate would not have the reputation it has if it simply did what it seemed it would do.
the upcoming congress of RAPP, which turned out to be the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers.
it was through the engine, the press, and the pistol that the Proletariat began to free itself from labor, ignorance, and tyranny.”
Shukhov Radio Tower?”
The Red Cavalry,
“everybody tells you something because they are everybody. But why should one listen to everybody? Did
they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration—and our unwavering determination to withhold our opinion until we have engaged with them in every possible setting at every possible hour.
Nizhny Novgorod,”
“you seem to have reconciled yourself to your situation.”
“As both a student of history and a man devoted to living in the present, I admit that I do not spend a lot of time imagining how things might otherwise have been. But I do like to think there is a difference between being resigned to a situation and reconciled to it.”
But what is rarely related is the fact that Life is every bit as devious as Death.
It too can wear a hooded coat. It too can slip into town, lurk in an alley, or wait in the back of a tavern.
the famine of ’32 eventually led to a migration of peasants to the cities,
“The age of the nobility has given way to the age of the common man,”
the Count would never have been inconvenienced by a fellow soul.
to possessions, he hadn’t cared a whit about them.
he singles out their unusual passion for material well-being. The minds of Americans, he says, are universally preoccupied with meeting the body’s every need and attending to life’s little comforts.
Perhaps it is inescapable that when our lives are in flux, despite the comfort of our beds, we are bound to keep ourselves awake grappling with anxieties—no matter how great or small, how real or imagined.
“Yes, silence can be an opinion,” said Mishka. “Silence can be a form of protest. It can be a means of survival. But it can also be a school of poetry—one with its own meter, tropes, and conventions. One that needn’t be written with pencils or pens; but that can be written in the soul with a revolver to the chest.”
Gulag—the zeks—became
For the French it is Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People; for the Dutch, Rembrandt’s Night Watch; for the Americans, Washington Crossing the Delaware;
and for us Russians? It is a pair of twins: Nikolai Ge’s Peter the Great Interrogating Alexei and Ilya Repin’s Ivan the Terrible and His Son.
we and the Americans will lead the rest of this century because we are the only nations who have learned to brush the past aside instead of bowing before it.
He described Mishka and his notion that Russians were somehow unusually adept at destroying that which they have created.
the destruction of monuments and masterpieces was essential to the progress of a nation.
“I guess the point I’m trying to make is that as a species we’re just no good at writing obituaries. We don’t know how a man or his achievements will be perceived three generations from now,
We must encourage them to venture out from under our watchful gaze, and then sigh with pride when they pass at last through the revolving doors of life. . . .” As
No matter how much time passes, those we have loved never slip away from us entirely.”
that over tens of thousands of years a species would slowly evolve in order to maximize its chances of survival.
when life makes it impossible for a man to pursue his dreams, he will connive to pursue them anyway.
For what matters in life is not whether we receive a round of applause; what matters is whether we have the courage to venture forth despite the uncertainty of acclaim.”
he took the greatest satisfaction when assuring a friend that a worldly matter could wait in favor of a leisurely lunch or a stroll along the embankment.
endeavors that most modern men saw as urgent (such as appointments with bankers and the catching of trains), probably could have waited, while those they deemed frivolous (such as cups of tea and friendly chats) had deserved their immediate attention.
the surest sign of wisdom is constant cheerfulness.
our lives are steered by uncertainties,
But in setting upright the cocktail glass in the aftermath of the commotion, didn’t he also exhibit an essential faith that by the smallest of one’s actions one can restore some sense of order to the world?
