Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

“No one had taught us how to be free. We had only ever been taught how to die for freedom.”

“The most important thing is spiritual labor...Books...You can wear the same suit for twenty years, two coats are enough for a lifetime, but you can't live without Pushkin or the complete works of Gorky.”

“I don’t like the word “hero.” There are no heroes in war. As soon as someone picks up a weapon, they can no longer be good. They won’t be able to.”

“Let time be the judge. Time is just, but only in the long term—not in the short term. The time we won’t live to see, which will be free of our prejudices.”

“People are constantly forced to choose between having freedom and having success and stability; freedom with suffering or happiness without freedom. The majority choose the latter.”

“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. I”

“In five years, everything can change in Russia, but in two hundred—nothing. Boundless”

“Pretty soon, I'll be decomposing into phosphorous, calcium, and so on. Who else will you find to tell you the truth? All that's left are the archives. Pieces of paper. And the truth is... I worked at an archive myself, I can tell you first hand: paper lies even more than people do.”

“Today, no one has time for feelings, they’re all out making money. The discovery of money hit us like an atom bomb…”

“The soul will fly home of its own accord, but shipping a coffin is pretty expensive.”

“My life has always been like a change jar. It’s full, then it’s empty, then it’s full again, then it’s empty again.”

“As my physics teacher always said, “My dear students! Just remember that money solves all problems, even differential equations.”

“I'm afraid of freedom, it feels like some drunk guy could show up and burn my dacha at any moment.”

“Instead of lullabies, my mother would sing us songs of the Revolution. Now she sings them to her grandchildren. 'Are you nuts?' I ask her. She replies, 'I don't know any other songs.”

“Our people need freedom like a monkey needs glasses. No one would know what to do with it.”

“truths. History is concerned solely with the facts; emotions are outside of its realm of interest. In fact, it’s considered improper to admit feelings into history. But I look at the world as a writer and not a historian. I am fascinated by people.”

“Instead of a Motherland, we live in a huge supermarket. If this is freedom, I don't need it. To hell with it!”

“More often, people were irritated with freedom. “I buy three newspapers and each one of them has its own version of the truth. Where’s the real truth? You used to be able to get up in the morning, read Pravda, and know all you needed to know, understand everything you needed to understand.” People were slow to come out from under the narcosis of old ideas. If I brought up repentance, the response would be, “What do I have to repent for?” Everyone thought of themselves as a victim, never a willing accomplice. One person would say, “I did time, too”; another, “I fought in the war”; a third, “I built my city up from the ruins, hauling bricks day and night.” Freedom had materialized out of thin air: Everyone was intoxicated by it, but no one had really been prepared. Where was this freedom? Only around kitchen tables, where out of habit people continued to badmouth the government. They reviled Yeltsin and Gorbachev: Yeltsin for changing Russia, and Gorbachev for changing everything. The entire twentieth century. 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.”

“Today, people just want to live their lives, they don’t need some great Idea. This is entirely new for Russia; it’s unprecedented in Russian literature. At heart, we’re built for war. We were always either fighting or preparing to fight. We’ve never known anything else—hence our wartime psychology. Even in civilian life, everything was always militarized. The drums were beating, the banners flying, our hearts leaping out of our chests. People didn’t recognize their own slavery—they even liked being slaves. I”

“There is no more pressing or torturous task for man, having found himself free, than to seek out someone to bow down to as soon as he can…someone on whom to bestow that gift of freedom with which this unhappy creature was born…”

“Witnesses can be manipulated, too. They’re not robots. They are manipulated by television, newspapers, friends, corporate interests…Who has the real truth? As far as I understand, the truth is something that’s sought out by specially trained experts: judges, scholars, priests. Everyone else is ruled by ambition and emotions. [A pause.] I’ve read your books…You shouldn’t put so much stock in what people say, in human truth…History records the lives of ideas. People don’t write it, time does. Human truth is just a nail that everybody hangs their hats on.”

“The strongest and most aggressive started doing business. We forgot all about Lenin and Stalin. And that’s what saved us from another civil war with Reds on the one side and Whites on the other. Friends and foes. Instead of blood, there was all this new stuff… 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…”

“The mysterious Russian soul... Everyone wants to understand it. They read Dostoevsky: what's behind that soul of theirs? Well, behind our soul there's just more soul.”

“My daughter married a Italian. His name is Sergio. When they come stay with me, he and I have our kitchen dialogues... in Russian...We'll talk until morning. Sergio thinks that Russians love to suffer, that that's the trick of the Russian soul. For us, suffering is '' a personal struggle,'' '' the path for salvation''. Italians aren't like that, they don't want to suffer. They love life, they believe is given to them to enjoy. Like...my daughter and Sergio will come home from the supermarket, and he'll be carrying the grocery bags. In the evening, she can play piano while he makes dinner. For me it was nothing like that: he'd try to take the bags from me, and I'd grab them away ''I'll do it. You shouldn't''. He'd come into the kitchen and I'd tell him, '' this isn't your place''.”

“I'm searching for a language. People speak many different languages: There's the one they use with children, another one for love. There's the language we use to talk to ourselves, for our internal monologues. On the street, at work, while traveling--everywhere you go, you'll hear something different, and it's not just the words, there's something else, too. There's even a difference between the way people speak in the morning and how they speak at night...”

“Time is just, but only in the long term—not in the short term. The time we won’t live to see, which will be free of our prejudices.”

“One morning, I overslept. After the war, if you were late to work…even ten minutes late, they could send you to prison. The foreman saved me: “Tell them I sent you down to the quarry…” If someone had informed on me, he would have been charged as well. After ’53, they stopped punishing lateness like that. After Stalin died, people started smiling again; before that, they lived carefully. Without smiles.”