Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Well, what do you consider yourself ?” Nestor blots the spot with his napkin. “I could say Russian, of course.” “What’s stopping you?” “Nothing, probably. I just don’t distinguish between those nations very well.”
Superfluous questions only spoil handsome theories.
Gleb walked down Leningradsky Prospect to Pravda Street, where the cellist he valued so highly lived. When he’d been given her address, it had felt a little strange that Anna’s life was now passing on a street with such an unexpected name, but he’d grown used to it back before he left for Moscow. He thought not about the newspaper Pravda but about truth as such, of which each person has his own: Anna, her parents, he himself. … His pravda, his truth, now was that he no longer wanted anything from Anna but sympathy and warmth
Hearing that Gleb had abandoned music in view of the death that awaits each of us, Fyodor became agitated and said that this was the act of a genuine musician. That the distinguishing trait of a musician was not the dexterity of his fingers but the constant thought of death, which should instill us with optimism, not horror. Meant to mobilize, not paralyze. “In other words, true creativity must balance between life and death,” Fyodor summed up. “It has to see a little beyond the horizon.”
