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Destiny. It was just a grand term for something you could do nothing about. When life said to you, “And so,” you nodded, and called it destiny. And so, it had been his destiny to be called Dmitri Dmitrievich.
this mattered. They inspected the resort’s lighthouse, but while Tanya craned her head upwards, his concentration was on the sweet fold of skin it made at the base of her neck.
But away from music…that was so different. He became nervous, things blurred in his mind, and he would sometimes make a decision simply in order to have the matter settled rather than because he knew what he wanted.
But whatever the cause, he was bad at the practicalities of life, which included, of course, the practicalities of the heart. And so, at Anapa, alongside the exaltations of love and the heady self-satisfaction of sex, he found himself entering a whole new world, one full of unwanted silences, misunderstood hints and scatter-brained planning.
It was a commonplace to say that tyranny turned the world upside down; and yet it was true. In the twelve years between 1936 and 1948, he had never felt safer than during the Great Patriotic War. A disaster to the rescue, as they say. Millions upon millions died, but at least suffering became more general, and in that lay his temporary salvation. Because, though tyranny might be paranoid, it was not necessarily stupid. If it were stupid, it would not survive; just as if it had principles, it would not survive. Tyranny understood how some parts—the weak parts—of most people worked. It had spent
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To be Russian was to be pessimistic; to be Soviet was to be optimistic. That was why the words Soviet Russia were a contradiction in terms.
He was an anxious man, and aware that anxiety makes people egotistical and bad company.
Jack
The natural progression of human life is from optimism to pessimism; and a sense of irony helps temper pessimism, helps produce balance, harmony.
Sarcasm was dangerous to its user, identifiable as the language of the wrecker and the saboteur.
But irony—perhaps,
might enable you to preserve what you valued, even as the noise of time became loud enoug...
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And in these times, people were always in danger of becoming less than fully themselves. If you terrorised them enough, they became something else, something diminished and reduced: mere techniques for survival.
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. Art does not exist for art’s sake: it exists for people’s sake.
He wrote music for the ears that could hear.
Ilf and Petrov had reported that there were no political offences in America, only criminal ones;
Will trump change that?
And that was why he could not kill himself: because then they would steal his story and rewrite it. He needed, if only in his own hopeless, hysterical way, to have some charge of his life, of his story.
He had always been a meticulous man. He visited the barber every two months and the dentist just as often—being as anxious as he was meticulous. He was always washing his hands; he emptied ashtrays as soon as he saw two stubs in them. He liked to know that things were working properly: water, electricity, plumbing.
But it was not easy being a coward. Being a hero was much easier than being a coward. To be a hero, you only had to be brave for a moment—when you took out the gun, threw the bomb, pressed the detonator, did away with the tyrant, and with yourself as well. But to be a coward was to embark on a career that lasted a lifetime. You couldn’t ever relax.
And how would he now appear to his younger self, standing by the roadside as a haunted face in an official car swept past? 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 soul could be destroyed in one of
three ways: by what others did to you; by what others made you do to yourself; and by what you voluntarily chose to do to yourself.
