Europe Central

Most literary critics agree that fiction cannot be reduced to mere falsehood. Well-crafted protagonists come to life, pornography causes orgasms, and the pretense that life is what we want it to be may conceivably bring about the desired condition. Hence religious parables, socialist realism, Nazi propaganda. And if this story likewise crawls with reactionary supernaturalism, that might be because its author longs to see letters scuttling across ceilings, cautiously beginning to reify themselves into angels. For if they could only do that, then why not us?

Self-deception is a pessimistic definition of optimism.

Do you want to know what happiness is? Happiness is the absence of unpleasant information.

The reformed addict who feels the craving almost believes in it, then merely smiles…

So then, in a pleading tone, he whispers: Why did you make me? I never wanted to be made… For propaganda, of course. It’s all in your own book. How can we persuade others to be good, without evil we can point to?

All that's happened is inconsequential; it cannot hurt us anymore; there's only music, which lives within us and beyond us, needing us to express it but capable of surviving forever between expressions.

We Communists say, if it has no practically measurable effect, it's not people's art!

He was really quite addicted to her face, and yet for the longest time he could not remember it at all, it being so much brighter than sunlight on a pool of water that he could only recall that blinding brightness; then after awhile, since she refused to give him her photograph, he began to practice looking away for a moment when he was still with her, striving to uphold in his inner vision what he had just seen (her pale, serious, smooth and slender face, oh, her dark hair, her dark hair), so that after immense effort he began to retain something of her likeness although the likeness was necessarily softened by his fallibility into a grainy, washed-out photograph of some bygone court beauty, the hair a solid mass of black except for parallel streaks of sunlight as distinct as the tines of a comb, the hand-tinted costume sweetly faded, the eyes looking sadly, gently through him, the entire image cob-webbed by a sheet of semitranslucent Thai paper whose white fibers twisted in the lacquered space between her and him like gorgeous worms; in other words, she remained eternally elsewhere.

I've come to recognize that questions of law and justice are at the same time questions of power.

Best listened to in a windowless room, better than best in an airless room—correctly speaking, a bunker sealed forever and enwrapped in tree-roots—the Eighth String Quartet of Shostakovich (Opus 110) is the living corpse of music, perfect in its horror. Call it the simultaneous asphyxiation and bleeding of melody. The soul strips itself of life in a dusty room.

A treble clef, for example, resembles a Muscovite or Leningrader in a bulky hooded parka. A bass clef bends as simply and painfully as a silhouetted widow in Leningrad drawing water from the whiteness of a frozen canal.

In the Hitler years we still believed in books enough to burn them. Imagine,

Plato says that as one learns to love, the image of any specific beloved can be left behind for knowledge of the Good.

Before [Hitler] slammed the door behind him, he needed there to be nothing left, not even the door itself.

I’ve never shot a civilian except when under orders.

Well let the gentlemen of the bourgeoisie remember Berlin any way they please. As Comrade Khruschev promised us, we will bury them.

So even that doesn’t make you happy? What about your Seventh Symphony? At least it rallied people. Once you told me how alive you felt then; you said you gave it your all— Didn’t you learn in school, he demanded in a hateful voice, that Ivan the Terrible, having coaxed his architect into, so to speak, putting the very best of himself into building Polrovsky Cathedral, afterwards put out his eyes? Anyway, things are so much easier in our century. LIFE HAS BECOME MORE JOYFUL!

The times are new, but the informers are old.

On the radio, Klavdia Sulzhenko sang “The Blue Kerchief.” The war had died; that song was getting old; then again, so was I. But

but the little operative codenamed GREINER, whom I was frankly beginning to consider defeatist, insisted that the Soviets had antidotes to everything, even unfortunate facts. I

We should have known that the only reason that Shostakovich’s nightmare restored us to ourselves was so we’d be compelled to drink the cup of anguish. It

I’m sure you’ve noticed, continued Comrade Luria, how much aestheticians like to prate about the impotence of form without content, or content without form. But in music, perfect form and content together can remain as stillborn as a law without the seal of Heaven on it. There has to be emotion . . .

23 He dreamed that a bomb was singing to him. From far away, the bomb was coming to marry him. The bomb was his destiny, falling on him, screaming.

Life calls for the highest order of deafness; then we can be, so to speak, happy. It

Mitya was almost ready to confess which chord it was which actually caused him to see rainbow icicles. Soon

as a certain classical slaveholder once wrote, nothing is more painful than days of joy recollected in days of misery. So

But illusions don’t die all at once—

whatever fate sends us quickly becomes us, and we grow blind to what we might otherwise have been. And

By your command, sir, I said. But Elena was still the one I loved. Knowing that I loved her, I knew who I was.