Books Quote by Keith Gessen

I read Russian literature a lot.

— Mikhail Baryshnikov

The greatest books in Russian literature are satires. Gogol's Dead Souls, for example, is a very over-the-top satire about life in Russia. I think…

— Gary Shteyngart

In the soul of a Russian person there is always a drive toward some kind of lofty moral ideal, lofty moral values. That definitely…

— Vladimir Putin

With certain rapturous exceptions, literature is the moral life.

— Cynthia Ozick

Russian literature got me interested in what literature means.

— Elif Batuman

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

— D. H. Lawrence

The book that made me decide to go into Russian literature was 'Anna Karenina,' which I first read in high school. The thing that…

— Elif Batuman

I always really loved Russian literature, and I think Tolstoy's writing is full of a sense of melancholy and humanity, so it seems really…

— Tuppence Middleton

Reduced... to a crude formula, the Russian tragedy is precisely the tragedy of a society in which literature turned out to be the prerogative…

— Joseph Brodsky

There's definitely a culture of Russian literature in Turkey. And in the U.S. too, to an extent - especially Dostoevsky.

— Elif Batuman

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all…

— George Orwell

Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.

— Anthony Burgess