Keith Gessen Quotes

The imputation to Brodsky of Russian nationalist views is, of course, paradoxical and worth considering.

I think that the basement where Orwell washed dishes in Paris was his first lesson in anti-humbug – and part of the lesson is that you have to keep renewing it. And Orwell did that.

People who can’t speak Russian will be less susceptible to Russian propaganda. But they will also be less susceptible to the poetry of Joseph Brodsky.

While I was in Astana, a ballet master from St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre staged a performance of ‘Giselle’ in the opera hall. It was one of only a few performances to grace Astana’s concert spaces in many weeks, and tickets were impossible to come by.

Bilingualism used to have an undeservedly bad reputation; then it got an undeservedly exalted one.

In the fall of 1963, in Leningrad, in what was then the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the young poet Dmitry Bobyshev stole the young poet Joseph Brodsky’s girlfriend.

When we started reading books to Raffi, I included some Russian ones. A friend had handed down a beautiful book of Daniil Kharms poems for children; they were not nonsense verse, but they were pretty close, and Raffi enjoyed them.

In 1939, Orwell wrote a long essay titled ‘Inside the Whale,’ about modernism, the nineteen-thirties, Henry Miller, and ‘Tropic of Cancer.’

The sudden collapse of the monarchy that had ruled Russia for three hundred years led to chaos. Russia immediately became, as one participant put it, ‘the freest country in the world.’

Baba Seva – Seva Efraimovna Gekhtman – was born in a small town in Ukraine in 1919. Her father was an accountant at a textile factory, and her mother was a nurse. Her parents moved to Moscow with her and her brothers when she was a child.

Brodsky was born in May, 1940, a year before the German invasion. His mother worked as an accountant; his father was a photographer and worked for the Navy Museum in Leningrad when Brodsky was young. They were doting parents and much beloved by Iosif Brodsky, who was their only child.

In truth, I was desperate to leave New York. And Moscow was a special place for me. It was the city where my parents had grown up, where they had met; it was the city where I was born.

I remember reading Dostoevsky’s ‘The Idiot’ in my grandmother’s Moscow apartment and feeling this call to be a better person.

I grew up in this household where reading was the most noble thing you could do. When I was a teenager, we would have family dinners where we all sat there reading. It wasn’t because we didn’t like each other. We just liked reading. The person who made my reading list until my late teen years was my mom.

I no longer remember when I started speaking to Raffi in Russian. I didn’t speak to him in Russian when he was in his mother’s womb, though I’ve since learned that this is when babies first start recognizing sound patterns.

In 1959, Moscow gave space to an exhibition of American consumer goods, and my father, also a member of this generation, tasted Pepsi for the first time.

My parents and my brother and I left the Soviet Union in 1981. I was six, and Dima was sixteen, and that made all the difference. I became an American, whereas Dima remained essentially Russian.

Stalin was born Joseph Dzhugashvili in 1878 in Gori, Georgia, on the periphery of the Russian Empire. His father was a hard-drinking cobbler whose relationship with Joseph’s mother, Keke Geladze, came to an end when the boy was around six years old.

I left the world of jail with plenty of relief but, more than anything, with a sense of unease that I still can’t quite shake.

My friend Leonid Shvets is a long-time journalist, commentator, and editor. He was born in Belarus and came to Kharkiv, in eastern Ukraine, to go to school, then moved to Kiev for work.

My grandmother was content to sit in the back yard wearing her old, wide-brimmed summer hat and occasionally getting up to feed herself raspberries from the seemingly inexhaustible bushes.

Astana is a government city, not a tourist city, but all you do is tour it. You tour it in the cab from the airport, passing the gleaming new English-language Nazarbayev University and then the new soccer stadium, speed-skating track, and ten-thousand-seat velodrome.

My parents were attached to Russian culture by a thousand ineradicable ties. But they did not cut me off from American society, nor could they have. I assimilated wholeheartedly, found my parents in many ways embarrassing, and allowed my Russian to decline through neglect.

I met with an Automaidan activist who was part of a self-appointed group drafting a lustration law for parliament, which would exclude from political life people who actively participated in Yanukovych’s criminal regime.

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