“My guess would be that our folly lies not in what threatens us, or even what eludes us, but in our inability to adapt to it.”

“In the Greek audience, fourteen thousand people sat down at the same time, to see a play … And nobody can tell me that those people were all readers of the New York Review of Books!”

On the Day of Poetry, a Russian festival: “Moscovite poets assemble in front of a huge crowd of eight or ten thousand people. There have been years when snow fell that day, but the crowd did not disband; it stood listening in the storm.”

“[Flaubert said] ‘If you want to describe courage, do not become a soldier; a lover, do not fall in love; a drunkard, do not drink wine.’ There is … a brilliant refutation of this theory: Stendhal.”

“[With Dr. Zhivago] it seemed to me that it was my duty to make a statement about our epoch. I wanted to record the past and to honor the beautiful and sensitive aspects of the Russia of those years.”

How they flare up, like a tinder bonfire
On the plaza of night, our holy convictions!
Before the usurping edict of tenderness

A day will come, lamenting, I hear,
When bright no longer with thrones, fires, tears,
My eyes which once incandescent ruled

In the world of friends, where travel is slower,
What do you do there, in the world of rain?
Who shares the segments of your tangerine?

The portraits that follow are from a large number of photographs recently recovered from sealed archives in Moscow, some—rumor has it—from a cache in the bottom of an elevator shaft. Five of those that follow, Akhmatova, Chekhov (with dog), Nabokov, Pasternak (with book), and Tolstoy (on horseback) are from a volume entitled The Russian Century, published early last year by Random House. Seven photographs from that research, which were not incorporated in The Russian Century, are published here for the first time: Bulgakov, Bunin , Eisenstein (in a group with Pasternak and Mayakovski), Gorki, Mayakovski, Nabokov (with mother and sister), Tolstoy (with Chekhov), and Yesenin. The photographs of Andreyev, Babel, and Kharms were supplied by the writers who did the texts on them. The photograph of Dostoyevsky is from the Bettmann archives. Writers who were thought to have an especial affinity with particular Russian authors were asked to provide the accompanying texts. We are immensely in their debt for their cooperation.

 

 

In his memoirs, Ehrenburg a recognized arbiter of taste in the Soviet Union speaks enthusiastically about the Twenties. He calls that period “the era of poetry,” contrasting it with our times