Word: russias
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Russian saying: the Tambov wolf is your comrade." I remembered his sneering tone as I stared at the flat landscape from the two- bunk compartment I was sharing with Yuri Shchekochikhin, a commentator from the Soviet weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta. So, you are heading off into the wilds of Russia? See for yourself how far the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev have gone. An image came to mind of perestroika as a stalled tractor, sinking ever deeper into the rich black earth of the Tambov region. It was a common Moscow view, as if nothing new could ever come...
Careful, there. This is no ordinary statue you're adjusting, but one representing the father of the state, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, the man who renamed himself Lenin and reshaped Russia in the Bolshevik Revolution. One crucial slip by workers at Moscow's All-Union Artistic-Production Association (hear the clang of bureaucracy in that name), and they must pour a whole new mold. In attempting nothing less than a second revolution, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is also adjusting Lenin, paying lip service to his dogma even while reshaping it to fit the needs of the U.S.S.R. The task is a delicate...
...have asked me, Wouldn't you like to go back and live again in the Soviet Union? After all, now they're rebuilding the society, they've published Doctor Zhivago, they don't arrest people anymore under Article 70 (for "anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation"), and the conscience of Russia, academician Sakharov, is practically a member of the government...
...anyone ask him whether or not he was planning to return to England? Who cares where Graham Greene lives -- in England or in France? And Hemingway, he lived quite peacefully in Cuba (can you imagine! on an island!) and didn't hurry back to his Great Homeland. But Russia, it seems, possesses particular advantages (borders, the KGB, internal passports, patriotism, perestroika, nostalgia) that for some reason must be satisfied. The whole world begs you: Since you're a Russian writer, live in Russia. Especially since there's perestroika...
Seventeen years before my own (physical) emigration, I emigrated from Russia in my books, and I don't regret it. In the final analysis, isn't it all the same where the body of a writer dwells, if his books belong to Russia...