Aleksandr Pushkin Quotes & Sayings

...she knew from school that that sort of literature was boring: Gorky was correct but somehow ponderous; Mayakovsky was very correct but somehow awkward; Saltykov-Shchedrin was progressive, but you could die yawning if you tried to read him through; Turgenev was limited to his nobleman's ideals; Goncharov was associated with the beginnings of Russian capitalism; Lev Tolstoi came to favor patriarchal peasantry - and their teacher did not recommend reading Tolstoi's novels because they were very long and only confused the clear critical essays written about him. And then they reviewed a batch of writers totally unknown to anyone: Dostoyevsky, Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, and Sukhovo-Kobylin. It was true that one did not even have to remember the titles of their works. In all this long procession, only Pushkin shone like a sun. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

No time for books, no patience. What good would they do? They don't tell you how to survive."
"No, they don't do that. They are reason, not tool." Vadim smirked. "They hold more truth than Pravda. Politburo can't lie in Pushkin. Pushkin was there before we became Soviets. It means ... if we have past, we have future." ( ... ) "At least I know that there are many truths. It's about learning to think different thoughts. Know things that you never felt. You could know what being rich feels like, or being in love, without ever getting real feeling. — Aleksandr Voinov