Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from Dreams of My Russian Summers:
“Once again I sensed in myself the mysterious gestation of that language so different from words blunted by use, a language in which I could have said softly, meeting Charlotte’s gaze: ‘Why does my heart miss a beat when I hear the distant call of the Kukushka? Why does an autumn morning in Cherbourg a hundred years ago, yes, a moment I have never lived through, in a town I have never visited, why do its light and breeze seem to me more alive than the days of my real life? Why does your balcony no longer float in the mauve air of the evening above the steppe? The transparency of dreams that once enveloped it is now broken like an alchemist’s flask. And the glass splinters crunch together and prevent us talking as we used to . . . Are not your memories, which I now know by heart, a cage that holds you prisoner? Is not our life simply the daily transformation of the fluid and warm present into a collection of frozen memories, like butterflies crucified on their pins in a dusty glass case? And if so, why do I sense that I should without hesitation exchange this whole collection for the unique sharp taste left on my lips by that little imaginary silver dish in that illusory café at Neuilly? For a single mouthful of Cherbourg’s salt breeze? For a single cry of the Kukushka recalled from my childhood?”
“What caused me most pain during the course of their nocturnal confessions was the indestructible love for Russia that these revelations inspired in me. My intellect, struggling with the bite of the vodka, rebelled: ‘This country is monstrous! Evil, torture, suffering and self-mutilation are the favourite pastimes of its inhabitants. And yet I love it? I love it for its absurdity. For its monstrosities. I see in it a higher meaning that no logic can penetrate . . .’ This love was a continual heartbreak. The blacker the Russia I was discovering turned out to be, the more violent my attachment became. As if in order to love it, one had to tear out one’s eyes, plug one’s ears, stop oneself thinking.”
“The unsayable! It was mysteriously linked, I now understood, to the essential. The essential was unsayable. Incommunicable. And everything in the world that tortured me with its silent beauty, everything that needed no words, seemed to be essential. The unsayable was essential.”
