Back to Moscow Quotes

“It struck me that the Russian word for compassion, sostradaniye, derived from the word suffering, stradaniye, and literally meant co-suffering. A compassionate person was, in Russian, a co-sufferer.”
― Guillermo Erades, Back to Moscow

“In spite of the years, Pushkin tells us, Tatyana remains in love with Onegin. Now, finally, she has a real chance to be with him. So, what does Tatyana do? Does she ditch her husband and elope with her true love? Nyet, she doesn’t. In the culminating scenes of Pushkin’s long poem, Tatyana decides to stick with her husband and, in her own nineteenth-century way, tells Onegin to fuck off. A simple love story which most Russians know by heart. Many are even able to recite entire chapters – ‘ya k vam pishu’, Tatyana’s letter, being an especially popular passage. The symbolism of the story should not be ignored. Tatyana, the pure girl from the countryside, embodies the essence of Russianness, while Onegin, the cosmopolitan bon vivant, is a cynical fucker corrupted by modern European values. Onegin’s life is about superficial pleasures. Tatyana’s is all about meaning.”
― Guillermo Erades, Back to Moscow

“Russia is lost" she continued. "First we had God. Then we had Lenin. Now we have nothing.”
― Guillermo Erades, Back to Moscow

“I loved the naive and hopeful tone of the soviet posters – the way they portrayed a world based on work and sacrifice. I found it therapeutic to look at these images, at their beautifully faded colours, to see all those soviet men and women working together for a common goal. Women looked stunning in these posters, but not in a delicate dyevushka way – they were strong and maternal: you could not picture these women putting on make-up or complaining about the food in a café. These women were resilient, self-sufficient, forward-looking.”
― Guillermo Erades, Back to Moscow

“I can’t read fiction any more,’ Sergey said abruptly, looking not at my book, but at his beer. ‘Such a waste of time. I haven’t read a novel in years. There are so many interesting things to read about real life in newspapers and magazines or history books. Why bother reading something that someone made up?’ ‘I used to think like that,’ I said, disappointed by Sergey’s lack of interest. ‘But in the end, if you think about it, fiction is not that different from non-fiction. Non-fiction offers a very partial view of reality. When authors choose what to say and what to leave out, they are already distorting facts. Because the biggest chunk of any story, real or fictional, always remains untold.”
― Guillermo Erades, Back to Moscow

“I had learned by now that, whenever confronted by a ‘how are you’ or ‘how are things’, Russians rarely answered with a simple ‘fine, thanks’. They saw the question not as a polite greeting formula, but as a welcome chance to enumerate the many problems life had recently dumped on them.”
― Guillermo Erades, Back to Moscow

“if you take Russians individually, one by one, they are the most honest people on Earth. They are so direct, so straightforward, they just can’t lie. Not in their genes. Russians can’t do hypocrisy, not like Westerners. That’s why they come across as rude. It’s not rudeness. It’s fucking honesty. But, shit, when it comes to the public sphere, that’s another story. Everything in this country is a big fucking lie”
― Guillermo Erades, Back to Moscow

“I admired the way Anton Pavlovich didn’t seem so much interested in telling a story as in conveying a nastroeniye – a mood or atmosphere. Anton Pavlovich is the master of nastroeniye, Lyudmila Aleksandrovna had told me, and he certainly was, capturing in his writing the essence of late nineteenth-century Russia.”
― Guillermo Erades, Back to Moscow

“Being wasted is a great way to visit a place for the first time, I realised – everything is illuminated in a special light and the impressions are much stronger.”
― Guillermo Erades, Back to Moscow

“Suzdal was gorgeous. It was sunny but not too warm and the centre of the town was crammed with beautifully coloured onion-shaped churches, blue and gold and yellow, and at first I thought it could have been the setting for one of Chekhov’s short stories, perhaps an unnamed provincial town, a town called simply S., where life passed without much drama. But as Lena and I walked around the centre, it occurred to me that Suzdal was more spiritual, more mysterious, more Dostoyevskian, and it wouldn’t have surprised me to see one of the Karamazov brothers, Alyosha maybe, turning a corner and walking towards me.”
― Guillermo Erades, Back to Moscow

“As we continued drinking, my understanding improved significantly. At some point I found myself totally immersed in the Russian conversation, almost unaware that I was speaking a foreign language. It was not that I knew more words, but I seemed more able to grasp the overall narrative – filling in the language gaps with my own drunken version of whatever was being said at the table.”
― Guillermo Erades, Back to Moscow

“I had learned that, ever since the perestroika, Russians had had a problem addressing each other. The word tovarisch – comrade – previously used to address any fellow soviet citizen, had become politically obsolete. But pre-revolutionary language was not really an option: during the seven decades of communism, the old words for sir and madam were deemed too bourgeois and had fallen into disuse. Now, when addressing a stranger, Russians were left with little choice but to say man, woman, boy, girl, or – to people around my age – young person.”
― Guillermo Erades, Back to Moscow