Quotes About Russian Literature

#1. I love the Russian classics very much, the Russian classical literature. But I also read modern literature. As far as Russian literature is concerned, I am very fond of Tolstoy and Chekhov, and I also enjoy reading Gogol very much.

Vladimir Putin

#2. I think if German literature could survive the '40s and Russian literature could survive Sovietism, American literature can survive Google.

Joshua Cohen

#3. I can say without affectation that I belong to the Russian convict world no less than I do to Russian literature. I got my education there, and it will last forever.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#4. Persecution mania is still around. In your writing, in your exchanges with people, meeting people who are in Russian affairs, Russian literature, etcetera.

Joseph Brodsky

#5. Russian literature saved my soul. When I was a young girl in school and I asked what is good and what is evil, no one in that corrupt system could show me.

Irina Ratushinskaya

#6. I hadn't planned on going to law school. I wanted to study 19th-century Russian literature.

Marian Wright Edelman

#7. The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart.

Ryszard Kapuscinski

#8. 'The Gambler' by Dostoevsky. It was the first time I realised that it was possible to have good and evil in one person. It led me to read a lot of Russian literature.

Sue Townsend

#9. That is almost the whole of Russian literature: the phenomenal coruscations of the souls of quite commonplace people.

D.H. Lawrence

#10. Twentieth-century Russian literature has produced nothing special except perhaps one novel and two stories by Andrei Platonov, who ended his days sweeping streets.

Joseph Brodsky

#11. I'm five minutes late to Russian literature, where Mrs. Mahone and her wig assign us a ten-page paper on The Brothers Karamazov.

Jennifer Niven

#12. I took a 19th-century Russian novel class in college and have been smitten with Russian literature ever since. Writers like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Grossman, and Solzhenitsyn tackle the great questions of morality, politics, love, and death.

Anthony Marra

#13. I will never go back. For the simple reason that all the Russia I need, after all, is with me
always with me. Her literature, her language, my own Russian childhood. I will never return, I will never surrender.

Vladimir Nabokov

#14. My dreams, my dreams! What has become of their sweetness? What indeed has become of my youth?

Alexander Pushkin

#15. I cannot perceive that you're still a girl. Ur kisses don't seem so innocent. They just drive me crazy!" #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion

Olga Goa

#16. You can always tell a pig by its grunt.

Nikolai Gogol

#17. God save us from seeing a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless. Those who plot impossible upheavals among us, are either young and do not know our people, or are hard-hearted men who do not care a straw either about their own lives or those of others.

Alexander Pushkin

#18. Friendship is merely a glorified expression. In reality it is nothing but a reciprocal outpouring of slops.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#19. Young man! If my notes should fall into your hands, remember that the best and most enduring changes are those which stem from an improvement in moral behaviour, without any violent upheaval.

Alexander Pushkin

#20. Although I think the word "pleasure" is unknown to you. More precisely, its practical meaning". #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion

Olga Goa

#21. Kostia: When I'm mowing, I don't ask myself why I'm here.
Theodore: You're here to be Master, Konstantin Dmitrievich.
As it's always been, by the grace of God

Leo Tolstoy

#22. Samuel Marshak was one of the founders of modern Russian children's literature. Soviet children used to know his poems by heart, but only since glasnost have American editors shown any interest in issuing his poems here.

Michael Patrick Hearn

#23. People are so like their first mother Eve: what they are given doesn't take their fancy. The serpent is forever enticing them to come to him, to the tree of mystery. They must have the forbidden fruit, or paradise will not be paradise for them.

Alexander Pushkin

#24. The whole world recognizes Russia's cultural achievements. It is impossible to imagine the world culture without Russian culture, without our music and literature.

Vladimir Putin

#25. We all come out from Gogol's 'Overcoat'.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#26. HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND NO ONE WILL GO AWAY UNSATISFIED!

Arkady Strugatsky

#27. Except for two or three older writers, all modern literature seems to me not literature but some sort of handicraft, which exists only so as to be encouraged, though one is reluctant to use its products.

Anton Chekhov

#28. You've got something that I don't have. Innocence. Ur eyes express it, & I can read everything in them". #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion

Olga Goa

#29. Epression still kept guard on him, and chased after him like a shadow - or like a faithful wife.

Alexander Pushkin

#30. Always wetweating-always wetweating!

Leo Tolstoy

#31. both touching and somehow repulsive.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#32. It's a lucky man who leaves early from life's banquet, before he's drained to the dregs his goblet - full of wine; yes, it's a lucky man who has not read life's novel to the end, but has been wise enough to part with it abruptly - like me with my Onegin.

Alexander Pushkin

#33. All is in a man's hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice, that's an axiom. It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most ... .

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#34. The Russian yearning for the meaning of life is the major theme of our literature, and this is the real point of our intelligentsia's existence.

Nikolai A. Berdyaev

#35. I give pleasure to you. Do not interfere..." #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion

Olga Goa

#36. He filled a shelf with a small army of books and read and read; but none of it made sense.. They were all subject to various cramping limitations: those of the past were outdated, and those of the present were obsessed with the past.

Alexander Pushkin

#37. Woman is deprived of rights from lack of education, and the lack of education results from the absence of rights. We must not forget that the subjection of women is so complete, and dates from such ages back that we are often unwilling to recognise the gulf that separates them from us.

Leo Tolstoy

#38. Destroy your manuscript, but save whatever you have inscribed in the margin out of boredom, out of helplessness, and, as it were, in a dream. (The Egyptian Stamp)

Osip Mandelstam

#39. Anger was buried far too early in a young heart, which perhaps contained much good.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#40. But she forgot nothing, and he sometimes forgot much too quickly, and, often that same day, encouraged by her composure, would laugh and frolic over the champagne, if friends stopped by. What venom must have been in her eyes at those moments yet he noticed nothing!

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#41. Margarita was never short of money. She could buy whatever she liked. Her husband had plenty of interesting friends. Margarita never had to cook. Margarita knew nothing of the horrors of living in a shared flat. In short ... was she happy? Not for a moment.

Mikhail Bulgakov

#42. Hundreds of versts of desolate, monotonous, sun-parched steppe cannot bring on the depression induced by one man who sits and talks, and gives no sign of ever going.

Anton Chekhov

#43. If circumstances should make it impossible (temporarily, I hope) for me to be a Russian writer, perhaps I shall be able, like the Pole Joseph Conrad, to become for a time an English writer ... ("Letter To Stalin")

Yevgeny Zamyatin

#44. I had studied Russian in college. I had gotten into it first through literature and then just really found it kind of fascinating; of course, this was during the Cold War. So they were kind of the other great enemy that you grew up hearing about.

Scott Shane

#45. I love a friendly chat and a friendly glass of wine during the evening - the time they call, for some accountable reason, 'between dog and wolf'.

Alexander Pushkin

#46. Whoever the priest is, he is called Father.

Alexander Pushkin

#47. But man is a fickle and disreputable creature and perhaps, like a chess-player, is interested in the process of attaining his goal rather than the goal itself.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#48. And even though we may be involved with the most important affairs, achieve distinction or fall into some great misfortune- all the same, let us never forget how good we all once felt here, all together, united by such good and kind feelings as made us, too, ... perhaps better than we actually are.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#49. It's a lucky man, a very lucky man, who is committed to what he believes, who has stifled intellectual detachment and can relax in the luxury of his emotions - like a tipsy traveller resting for the night at wayside inn.

Alexander Pushkin

#50. Such a beginning presaged nothing good. However, I lost neither courage nor hope. I turned to the consolation of all those in distress, and for the first time tasted the sweetness of prayer, poured forth from a pure but riven heart. I fell asleep serenely, unworried as to what was to become of me.

Alexander Pushkin

#51. And it has always been a mystery, and I've marveled a thousand times at this ability of man (and, it seems, of the Russian man above all) to cherish the highest ideal in his soul alongside the greatest baseness, and all that in perfect sincerity.
The Adolescent (or, The Raw Youth)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#52. You are like the winged goddess from Greek mythology. As beautiful and soaring like an angel as her". #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion:

Olga Goa

#53. There's a reason every book, even one that isn't very serious, is shaped like a suitcase

Sergei Dovlatov

#54. Literature, art, science, and religion degenerate when polemical struggle supplants the independent creation of ideas.

Semen Frank

#55. A word aptly uttered or written cannot be cut away by an axe.

Nikolai Gogol