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workers must be trained to become composers, and all music must be instantly comprehensible and pleasing to the masses.
to be Russian was to be pessimistic.
The natural progression of human life is from optimism to pessimism; and a sense of irony helps temper pessimism, helps produce balance, harmony.
When you chop wood, the chips fly: that’s what the builders of socialism liked to say. Yet what if you found, when you laid down your axe, that you had reduced the whole timberyard to nothing but chips?
Proletarian purity was as important to the Soviets as Aryan purity was to the Nazis.
Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.
Perhaps this was one of the tragedies life plots for us: it is our destiny to become in old age what in youth we would have most despised.
A man who never lived long enough to disappoint others, or for life to disappoint him.
It gave you dreams, it gave you nightmares, and it made everyone – adults and children alike – fearful.
It = Socialism
The last questions of a man’s life do not come with any answers; that is their nature. They merely wail in the head, factory sirens in F sharp.
