Books Quote by Joseph Brodsky

All literature has this moral strain, but in Russian literature, it's particularly sharp.

— Keith Gessen

The great drama of Russian history has been between its state and society. Put simply, Russia has always had too much state and not…

— Fareed Zakaria

“In other words, if Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy showed more than their fair share of pathology it was due less to the requirements of their…

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Tragedy is a literary concept.

— David Hockney

The clash between the aspirations of the people for a better life and the insistence of their rulers on building a powerful state, regardless…

— Harrison Salisbury

Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century. As for the Russian…

— Vladimir Putin

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

— D. H. Lawrence

“Russia used to be great, a nation of philosophers, brilliant thinkers, artists, and scientists. Not anymore. It hasn’t been great for a long time,…

— Penny Reid

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Everybody has a different idea of when those good old days were, but everyone is convinced that there was a time when literature really…

— Robert Hass

As awful as the crimes of Stalinism were, the vast majority of the Russian population was trying to survive, to love, to have a…

— Amor Towles

“To be a Russian writer at the end of the nineteenth century must have meant bearing an inescapably bitter fate. The more they tried…

— Haruki Murakami