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Now we would live no worse than anyone else. We’d be just like everyone else. We thought that this time, we’d finally get it right.
Russia was changing and hating itself for changing. “The immobile Mongol,” Marx wrote of Russia.
We’re accustomed to looking at the history of people by day, while suicide is a nighttime state, when a person wavers on the edge between being and non-being. Waking and sleep. I want to understand suicide with the rigor of a person in daytime. Someone once asked me: “Are you worried that you’re going to like it?”
On the eve of the 1917 Revolution, Alexander Grin wrote, “And the future seems to have stopped standing in its proper place.” Now, a hundred years later, the future is, once again, not where it ought to be. Our time comes to us secondhand.
They read Dostoevsky: What’s behind that soul of theirs? Well, behind our soul there’s just more soul.
Life! We chose the beautiful life. No one wanted to die beautifully anymore, everyone wanted to live beautifully instead. The only problem was that there wasn’t really enough to go around…
ultimately books had disappointed them. People were disillusioned. It became rude to ask, “What are you reading?” Too much about our lives had changed, and these weren’t things that you could read about in books.
Where do I want to live, in a great country or a normal one?
—Communism is too great an undertaking…We’re always either demanding a constitution or Sevruga caviar with a side of horseradish…
My husband is an economist, and it would drive him up the wall: “Poets are capable of setting people’s hearts on fire with words. You’re going to end up with a revolution on your hands—and then what? How are you going to build democracy? Who’s going to do it? I can already see what your efforts are leading to.” He laughed at me. We ended up getting divorced because of it…But as it turned out, he was right…
I tried to talk about this with my students…They laughed in my face: “We don’t want to suffer. That’s not what our lives are about.” We haven’t understood a thing about the world we’d only recently been living in and yet we’re already living in a new one. An entire civilization lies rotting on the trash heap…
I remember my father’s words: “It’s possible to survive the camps, but you can’t survive other people.”
In every household, there’s someone who’s either doing time or has already been to prison. The police can’t cope. Only the women don’t give up, they keep digging in their vegetable gardens.
Only a Soviet person can understand another Soviet person. I wouldn’t have talked to anyone else…
Its image of an international socialist brotherhood lived on in Soviet propaganda to the very end, which compounded the trauma of the reemergence of nationalism in soon-to-be former Soviet republics at the fissure of the Soviet empire.
You can wear the same suit for twenty years, two coats are enough to last a lifetime, but you can’t live without Pushkin or the complete works of Gorky. You’re part of the grand scheme of things, there’s a grand scheme…That’s how they lived…
Why even ask? We all grew up with it. Art loves death, especially our art. The cult of martyrdom and death is in our blood. Life for aortic rupture*5
reality, for me, I’m just a twit, freedom of speech would have been enough because, as it soon turned out, at heart, I’m a Soviet girl. Everything Soviet went deeper in us than we’d ever imagined.
People dreamt that tons of salami would appear at the stores at Soviet prices and members of the Politburo would stand in line for it along with the rest of us. Salami is a benchmark of our existence. Our love for salami is existential…
It’s dangerous living too long. My time was up before my life could end. You have to die along with your era.
I remember so much…and for what? Huh? For what? What am I supposed to do with all of this?
War and prison are the two most important words in the Russian language. Truly Russian words! Russian women have never had normal men. They keep healing and healing them. Treating them like heroes and children at the same time. Saving them. To this very day.
His favorite saying was, “His trees and flowers turned out much better than His people did.”
How did you make it out of there alive?” “My parents loved me a lot when I was little.” We’re saved by the amount of love we get, it’s our safety net. Yes…only love can save us. Love is a vitamin that humans can’t live without—the blood curdles, the heart stops.
We’re standing there, two beggar girls in some kind of respectable setting…Cold and hungry…And here she is giving us flowers! The only thing we ever thought about was bread, but this person saw that we were capable of thinking about other things as well. You’re locked up, walled in by your circumstances, and suddenly, someone cracks the window…Lets in some fresh air. It turns out that besides bread, besides food, people were capable of giving us flowers! It meant that we really were no different than anyone else.
According to Abkhazian custom, the time you spend with guests around the table doesn’t count toward your lifespan because you’re drinking wine and enjoying yourself.
I’m listening to my words and thinking that I can’t be saying these things because I don’t know these words and I’m dumb and only like buttered rolls…
Where would I like to live? Inside my childhood…
I was totally Soviet—it’s shameful to love money, you have to love a dream.
My mother—my son—me…we all live in different countries, even though they’re all Russia.
Meanwhile, for decades, the death machine worked nonstop…Its logic was brilliant: The victims are accused of being executioners and then, in the end, the executioners themselves become the victims.
He said, “I’m glad I left in time. For a while, people liked Russians, now they’re afraid of us again. Aren’t you?”
During the day, people weren’t laughing anymore, they weren’t joking around, they’d stopped buying flowers. It used to be that there was always someone walking down the street with a bouquet. People kissing here and there. Now the same people were walking down the street avoiding one another’s gaze…
I don’t like the smell of men—not the smell of sex, but the smell of men. In the bathroom, I can always tell if there’s been a man in there…even if he wears the most expensive cologne and smokes expensive cigarettes…I am filled with horror when I consider how hard you have to work to keep someone in your life. It’s like breaking rocks at a quarry!
No one has ever asked me so many questions about my life before, that’s why I’m talking so much. “Mama, put your soul away,” my girls will say. They’re always educating me. Young people today inhabit a world that’s much crueler than the Soviet Union…[
You’re a writer, you’ll understand what I mean: Words have very little in common with what goes on inside of you.
People can be programmed…Some of them want to be.
In five years, everything can change in Russia, but in two hundred—nothing.
If you look in Dal’s dictionary, you will find that the word for goodness comes from the verb that means to live in plenty, with many goods…It’s when your life has dignity and stability…We don’t have any of those things here.
Even if we win and they write about it in the history books, what about the tears of our loved ones? Their suffering?
