Pushkin Quotes

Those books of mine really got under their skin. Ironically, they thought I was inhuman because of the way I churned through library books.
How do you know how to pick them? Who tells you?' Daved asked me once.
I explained that there was a line. 'If you read Dostoyevsky, he mentions Pushkin, and so you go and read Pushkin and he mentions Dante, and so you go and read Dante and
'
All right!'
All books are in some way about other books.'
I get it! ~ Steve Toltz

An emigration is possibly the loneliest experience a man can suffer. In a way it is not a country he has lost but a home, or even just a part of a home, a room perhaps, or something in that room that he has had to leave behind, and which haunts him. I remember a window-seat I used to sit in as a youth, reading Pushkin and teaching myself to smoke scented cigarettes. That window is one I am always knocking at, asking to be let in. ~ Paul Scott

But flaming youth in all it's madness
Keeps nothing of its heart concealed:
It's loves and hates, its joys and sadness,
Are babbled out and soon revealed. ~ Alexander Pushkin

Not long ago, after my last trip to Russia, I had a conversation with an American very eminent in the field of politics. I asked what he read, and he replied that he studied history, sociology, politics and law.

"How about fiction - novels, plays poetry?" I asked.

"No," he said, "I have never had time for them. There's so much else I have to read."

I said, "Sir, I have recently visited Russia for the third time and don't know how well I understand Russians; but I do know that if I only read Russian history I could not have had the access to Russian thinking I have had from reading Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pushkin, Turgenev, Sholokhov, and Ehrenburg. History only recounts, with some inaccuracy, what they did. The fiction tells, or tries to tell, why they did it and what they felt and were like when they did it."

My friend nodded gravely. "I hadn't though of that," he said. "Yes, that might be so; I had always thought of fiction as opposed to fact."

But in considering the American past, how poor we would be in information without Huckleberry Fin, An American Tragedy, Winesburg, Ohio, Main Street, The Great Gatsby, and As I Lay Dying. ~ John Steinbeck

TO MY MIND, PUSHKIN BEST SUMS UP THE SEASON: Lovely summer, how I could cherish you / If heat and dust and gnats and flies were banished. ~ Paul Russell

In this, our age of infamy Man's choice is but to be A tyrant, traitor, prisoner: No other choice has he. ~ Alexander Pushkin

Fickle as water,
our life is as dreamlike as smoke
- at our expense,
fate's private joke.
-The Bronze Horseman ~ Alexander Pushkin

Want of courage is the last thing to be pardoned by young men, who usually look upon bravery as the chief of all human virtues, and the excuse for every possible fault. ~ Alexander Pushkin

My whole life has been pledged to this meeting with you ... ~ Alexander Pushkin

I only wanted books - nothing more - only books, only words, it was never anything but words - give them to me, I don't have any! Look, see, I don't have any! Look, I'm naked, barefoot, I'm standing before you - nothing in my pants pockets, nothing under my shirt or under my arm! They're not stuck in my beard! Inside - look - there aren't any inside either - everything's been turned inside out, there's nothing there! Only guts! I'm hungry! I'm tormented!...
What do you mean there's nothing? Then how can you talk and cry, what words are you frightened with, which ones do you call out in your sleep? Don't nighttime cries roam inside you, a thudding twilight murmur, a fresh morning shriek? There they are words - don't you recognize them? They're writhing inside you, trying to get out! There they are! They're yours! From wood, stone, roots, growing in strength, a dull mooing and whining in the gut is trying to get out; a piece of tongue curls, the torn nostrils swell in torment. That's how the bewitched, beaten, and twisted snuffle with a mangy wail, their boiled white eyes locked up in closets, their vein torn out, backbone gnawed; that's right, that's how your pushkin writhe, or mushkin - what is in my name for you? - pushkin-mushkin, flung upon the hillock like a shaggy black idol, forever flattened by fences, up to his ears in di, the pushkin-stump, legless, six-fingered, biting his tongue, nose in his chest - and his head can't be raised! - pushkin, tearing off the pois ~ Tatyana Tolstaya

I like the hip writers: Fitzgerald, the guy who committed suicide, Hemingway, all those guys. Some of them were alcoholics and drug addicts but they had fun. They were real people. They formed the culture of American literature. Hemingway admired Tolstoy, Tolstoy admired Pushkin, and Mailer admired Hemingway. It all flows down. The greats are all connected. One day I'm gonna write a book myself. The first chapter will be about what a rough deal my momma got. She believed in you guys and your society. ~ Mike Tyson

In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality. At times monstrous images are created, but the setting and the whole picture are so truthlike and filled with details so delicate, so unexpectedly, but so artistically consistent, that the dreamer, were he an artist like Pushkin or Turgenev even, could never have invented them in the waking state. Such sick dreams always remain long in the memory and make a powerful impression on the overwrought and deranged nervous system. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Light-minded society mercilessly persecutes in reality what it allows in theory ~ Alexander Pushkin

Pushkin loved to throw rocks. As soon as he saw a rock, he would throw it. Sometimes he became so excited that he stood, all red in the face, waving his arms, throwing rocks, simply something awful.
Pushkin had four sons, all idiots. One didn't even know how to sit in a chair and fell off all the time. Pushkin himself also sat on a chair rather badly. It was simply killing: they sat at the table; at one end, Pushkin kept falling off his chair continually, and at the other end, his son. Simply enough to make one split one's sides with laughter. ~ Daniil Kharms

Enough! Clear-souled and far from wasted,
I start upon an untrod way
To take my rest from yesterday. ~ Alexander Pushkin

Between the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I must have read more fiction and poetry - English, Russian and French - than in any other five-year period of my life. I relished especially the works of Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Alexander Blok. On another level, my heroes were the Scarlet Pimpernel, Phileas Fogg, and Sherlock Holmes. In other words, I was a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library. At a later period, in Western Europe, between the ages of 20 and 40, my favorites were Housman, Rupert Brooke, Norman Douglas, Bergson, Joyce, Proust, and Pushkin. Of these top favorites, several - Poe, Jules Verne, Emmuska Orezy, Conan Doyle, and Rupert Brooke - have lost the glamour and thrill they held for me. The others remain intact and by now are probably beyond change as far as I am concerned. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Somewhere between obsession and compulsion is impulse. ~ Alexander Pushkin

Even Pushkin, who could understand everything, did not grasp the real significance of Dead Souls. He thought that the author was grieving for Russia, ignorant, savage, and outdistanced by the other nations. But it is not only in Russia that Gogol discovers "dead souls." All men, great and small, seem to him lunatics, lifeless, automata which obediently and mechanically carry out commandments imposed on them from without. They eat, they drink, they sin, they multiply; with stammering tongue they pronounce meaningless words. No trace of free will, no sparkle of understanding, not the slightest wish to awake from their thousand-year sleep. ~ Lev Shestov

Unrequited love is not an affront to man but raises him. ~ Alexander Pushkin

Sauvage, sad, silent,
as timid as the sylvan doe,
in her own family
she seemed a strangeling. ~ Alexander Pushkin

Ballet is a dance executed by the human soul. ~ Alexander Pushkin

He's happy now, he's almost sane. ~ Alexander Pushkin

A language has genius. Some works translate well, others are untranslatable. Molière is effective only in French. Without knowing Arabic nobody has ever understood the Koran. Pushkin remains a possession of the Russian people, though the world has acquired Tolstoy. In general, the higher the charge of peculiarly national identity and emotion, the less translatable a work is. ~ Herman Wouk

Our northern summers, though, are versions Of southern winters, this is clear; And though we're loath to cast aspersions, They seem to go before they're here! The sky breathed autumn, turned and darkled; The friendly sun less often sparkled; The days grew short and as they sped, The wood with mournful murmur shed Its wondrous veil to stand uncovered; The fields all lay in misty peace; The caravan of cackling geese Turned south; and all around there hovered The sombre season near at hand; November marched across the land. ~ Alexander Pushkin

No time for books, no patience. What good would they do? They don't tell you how to survive."
"No, they don't do that. They are reason, not tool." Vadim smirked. "They hold more truth than Pravda. Politburo can't lie in Pushkin. Pushkin was there before we became Soviets. It means ... if we have past, we have future." ( ... ) "At least I know that there are many truths. It's about learning to think different thoughts. Know things that you never felt. You could know what being rich feels like, or being in love, without ever getting real feeling. ~ Aleksandr Voinov

I want to understand you,
I study your obscure language. ~ Alexander Pushkin

Such a beginning presaged nothing good. However, I lost neither courage nor hope. I turned to the consolation of all those in distress, and for the first time tasted the sweetness of prayer, poured forth from a pure but riven heart. I fell asleep serenely, unworried as to what was to become of me. ~ Alexander Pushkin

I've lived to se my longings die
I've lived to se my longings die:
My dreams and I have grown apart;
Now only sorrow haunts my eye,
The wages of a bitter heart.
Beneath the storms of hostile fate,
My flowery wreath has faded fast;
I live alone and sadly wait
To see when death will come at last.
Just so, when the winds in winter moan
And snow descends in frigid flakes,
Upon a naked branch, alone,
The final leaf of summer shakes! ... ~ Alexander Pushkin

Rousseau (I'll note with your permission)
Could not conceive how solemn Grimm
Dared clean his nails in front of him,
The madcap sage and rhetorician.
Champion of rights and liberty,
In this case judged wrong-headedly.
One still can be a man of action
And mind the beauty of one's nails:
Why fight the age's predilection?
Custom's a despot and prevails. ~ Alexander Pushkin

The noontide of my life is starting,
Which I must needs accept, I know;
But oh, my light youth, if we're parting,
I want you as a friend to go!
My thanks to you for the enjoyments,
The sadness and the pleasant torments,
The hubbub, storms, festivity,
For all that you have given me;
My thanks to you. I have delighted
In you when times were turbulent,
When times were calm... to full extent;
Enough now! With a soul clear-sighted
I set out on another quest
And from my old life take a rest.

Let me glance back. Farewell, you arbours
Where, in the backwoods, I recall
Days filled with indolence and ardours
And dreaming of a pensive soul.
And you, my youthful inspiration,
Keep stirring my imagination,
My heart's inertia vivify,
More often to my corner fly.
Let not a poet's soul be frozen,
Made rough and hard, reduced to bone
And finally be turned to stone
In that benumbing world he goes in,
In that intoxicating slough
Where, friends, we bathe together now. ~ Alexander Pushkin

Habit is heaven's gift to us:
a substitute for happiness. ~ Alexander Pushkin

Whoever you be, O my reader-
friend, foe- I wish with you
to part at present as a pal.
Farewell. Whatever you in my wake
sought in these careless strophes-
tumultuous recollections,
relief from labors,
live pictures or bons mots,
or faults of grammar-
God grant that you,
in this book,
for recreation, for the daydream,
for the heart, for jousts in journals,
may find at least a crumb.
Upon which, let us part, farewell! ~ Alexander Pushkin

In alien lands I keep the body
Of ancient native rites and things:
I gladly free a little birdie
At celebration of the spring.
I'm now free for consolation,
And thankful to almighty Lord:
At least, to one of his creations
I've given freedom in this world! ~ Alexander Pushkin

And thus they aged, as do all mortals.
Until at last the husband found
That death had opened wide its portals,
Through which he entered, newly crowned. ~ Alexander Pushkin

Tell him that riches will not procure for you a single moment of happiness. Luxury consoles poverty alone, and at that only for a short time, until one becomes accustomed to it. ~ Alexander Pushkin

The Romanovs inhabit a world of family rivalry, imperial ambition, lurid glamour, sexual excess and depraved sadism; this is a world where obscure strangers suddenly claim to be dead monarchs reborn, brides are poisoned, fathers torture their sons to death, sons kill fathers, wives murder husbands, a holy man, poisoned and shot, arises, apparently, from the dead, barbers and peasants ascend to supremacy, giants and freaks are collected, dwarfs are tossed, beheaded heads kissed, tongues torn out, flesh knouted off bodies, rectums impaled, children slaughtered; here are fashion-mad nymphomaniacal empresses, lesbian ménage à trois, and an emperor who wrote the most erotic correspondence ever written by a head of state. Yet this is also the empire built by flinty conquistadors and brilliant statesmen that conquered Siberia and Ukraine, took Berlin and Paris, and produced Pushkin, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky and Dostoevsky; a civilization of towering culture and exquisite beauty. ~ Simon Sebag Montefiore

And once more given to inaction,
Empty in spirit and alone,
He settled down – to the distraction
Of making other minds his own;
Collecting books, he stacked a shelfful,
Read, read, not even one was helpful:
Here, there was dullness, there pretence;
This one lacked conscience, that one sense;
All were by different shackles fettered;
And, past times having lost their hold,
The new still raved about the old.
Like women, books he now deserted,
And mourning taffeta he drew
Across the bookshelf's dusty crew. ~ Alexander Pushkin

He knew this place, where once in sport/The flood had played and waves had bubbled,/Defiant in their fierce despair;/He knew these lions, and this square,/And him whose bronze head dominated/The darkness from its lofty height –/Whose fateful head will had on this site/Decreed a city be created. ~ Alexander Pushkin

Love passed, the Muse appeared, the weather
of mind got clarity new-found;
now free, I once more weave together
emotion, thought, and magic sound. ~ Alexander Pushkin

I loved you; even now I may confess, Some embers of my love their fire retain; But do not let it cause you more distress, I do not want to sadden you again. Hopeless and tongue tied, yet I loved you dearly With pangs the jealous and the timid know; So tenderly I loved you, so sincerely, I pray God grant another love you so. ~ Alexander Pushkin

Bound for your distant home"

Bound for your distant home
you were leaving alien lands.
In an hour as sad as I've known
I wept over your hands.
My hands were numb and cold,
still trying to restrain
you, whom my hurt told
never to end this pain.

But you snatched your lips away
from our bitterest kiss.
You invoked another place
than the dismal exile of this.
You said, 'When we meet again,
in the shadow of olive-trees,
we shall kiss, in a love without pain,
under cloudless infinities.'

But there, alas, where the sky
shines with blue radiance,
where olive-tree shadows lie
on the waters glittering dance,
your beauty, your suffering,
are lost in eternity.
But the sweet kiss of our meeting ......
I wait for it: you owe it me ....... ~ Alexander Pushkin

He who has lived and thought can never
Help in his soul despising men,
He who has felt will be forever
Haunted by days he can't regain.
For him there are no more enchantments,
Him does the serpent of remembrance,
Him does repentance always gnaw.
All this will frequently afford
A great delight to conversations. ~ Alexander Pushkin

But even friendship like our heroes'
Exist no more; for we've outgrown
All sentiments and deem men zeroes
Except of course ourselves alone.
We all take on Napoleon's features,
And millions of our fellow creatures
Are nothing more to us than tools ...
Since feelings are for freaks and fools.
Eugene, of course, had keen perceptions
And on the whole despised mankind,
Yet wasn't, like so many, blind;
And since each rule permits exceptions,
He did respect a noble few,
And, cold himself, gave warmth its due. ~ Alexander Pushkin

Moral commonplaces are amazingly useful when we can find little in ourselves with which to justify our actions. ~ Alexander Pushkin

Perhaps you'd like, you gentle fellow,
To hear what I'm prepared to say
On "kinfolk" and their implications?
Well, here's my view of close relations:
They're people whom we're bound to prize,
To honor, love, and idolize,
And following the old tradition,
To visit come the Christmas feast,
Or send a wish by mail at least;
All other days they've our permission,
To quite forget us if they please-
So grant them, God, long life and ease! ~ Alexander Pushkin

I saw Derzhavin only once in my life but shall never forget that occasion. It was in 1815 at a public examination in the Lyceum. When we boys learned Derzhavin was coming, all of us grew excited. Delvig went out on the stairs to wait for him and kiss his hand, the hand that had written 'The Waterfall.' Derzhavin arrived. Derzhavin entered the vestibule, and Delvig heard him ask the janitor: 'Where is the privy here, my good fellow?' This prosaic question disenchanted Delvig, who canceled his intent and returned to the reception hall. Delvig told me the story with wonderful bonhomie and good humor. ~ Alexander Pushkin

From an evil dog be glad of a handful of hairs. ~ Alexander Pushkin

I am married and happy. My only wish is that nothing will change. ~ Alexander Pushkin

It may be he was born to fire
The world with good, or earn at least
A gloried name; his silenced lyre
Might well have raised, before it ceased,
A call to ring throughout the ages.
Perhaps, upon the world's great stages,
He might have scaled a loft height.
His martyred shade, condemned to night,
Perhaps has carried off forever
Some sacred truth, a living word,
Now doomed by death to pass unheard;
And in the tomb his shade shall never
Receive our race's hymns of praise,
Nor hear the ages bless his days. ~ Alexander Pushkin

I am not in the position to sacrifice the essentials of life in the hope of acquiring the luxuries. -Pushkin ~ Alexander Pushkin

We still have our television and our books, our imagination. Children grow up in their houses, without the forest and the river. They can only look at them. These are completely different children. And I go to them and recite Pushkin, who I thought was eternal. And then I have this terrible thought: what if our entire culture is just an old trunk with a bunch of stale manuscripts? Everything I love . . . He: ~ Svetlana Alexievich

I foresee all: how I'll annoy
You deeply, by my sad confession:
What bitter scorn in your expression,
How proud the glance you'll employ!
What can I hope for? With what aim
Reveal my soul, and thereafter
Open myself to endless blame,
Prompting your malicious laughter? ~ Alexander Pushkin

On Translating Eugene Onegin


1
What is translation? On a platter
A poet's pale and glaring head,
A parrot's screech, a monkey's chatter,
And profanation of the dead.
The parasites you were so hard on
Are pardoned if I have your pardon,
O, Pushkin, for my stratagem:
I traveled down your secret stem,
And reached the root, and fed upon it;
Then, in a language newly learned,
I grew another stalk and turned
Your stanza patterned on a sonnet,
Into my honest roadside prose--
All thorn, but cousin to your rose.


2
Reflected words can only shiver
Like elongated lights that twist
In the black mirror of a river
Between the city and the mist.
Elusive Pushkin! Persevering,
I still pick up Tatiana's earring,
Still travel with your sullen rake.
I find another man's mistake,
I analyze alliterations
That grace your feasts and haunt the great
Fourth stanza of your Canto Eight.
This is my task--a poet's patience
And scholastic passion blent:
Dove-droppings on your monument. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

People are so like their first mother Eve: what they are given doesn't take their fancy. The serpent is forever enticing them to come to him, to the tree of mystery. They must have the forbidden fruit, or paradise will not be paradise for them. ~ Alexander Pushkin

I loved you: and, it may be, from my soul
The former love has never gone away,
But let it not recall to you my dole;
I wish not sadden you in any way.
I loved you silently, without hope, fully,
In diffidence, in jealousy, in pain;
I loved you so tenderly and truly,
As let you else be loved by any man. ~ Alexander Pushkin

He who has lived and thought can't help
despising people in his soul;
him who has felt disturbs
the ghost of irrecoverable days;
for him there are no more enchantments;
him does the snake of memories,
him does repentance bite. ~ Alexander Pushkin

My dreams, my dreams! What has become of their sweetness? What indeed has become of my youth? ~ Alexander Pushkin

On the bottom shelf M. kept the books from his childhood days: Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, the Iliad - they are described in The Noise of Time and happened to have been saved by M.'s father. Most of them later perished in Kalinin when I was fleeing from the Germans. The way we have scurried to and fro in the twentieth century, trapped between Hitler and Stalin! ~ Nadezhda Mandelstam

The forbidden cabinet. The forbidden fruit. That fruit is - a volume, a huge blue-lilac volume with a gold inscription slantwise: Collected Works of A.S. Pushkin. I read the fat Pushkin in the cabinet with my nose in the book and on the shelf, almost in darkness and almost right up against it and even a little bit suffocated by his weight that came right into the throat, and almost blinded by the nearness of the tiny letters. I read Pushkin right into the chest and right into the brain. ~ Marina Tsvetaeva

The less we show our love to a woman, Or please her less, and neglect our duty, The more we trap and ruin her surely In the flattering toils of philandery. ~ Alexander Pushkin

They were tough and sour, but as Pushkin said, 'Dearer to us than a host of truths is an exalting illusion.' I saw a happy man, whose cherished dream had so obviously come true, who had attained his goal in life, had gotten what he wanted, who was content with his fate and with himself. For some reason there had always been something sad mixed with my thoughts about human happiness, but now, at the sight of a happy man, I was overcome by an oppressive feeling close to despair.
- Gooseberries ~ Anton Chekhov

That wondrous instant of our meeting -
my mind's eye sees you standing there,
a vision transient and fleeting,
true beauty's spirit, pure and rare.

In toils of hopeless grief confounded,
amid life's noise and stress it seems
for long that tender voice resounded
and those sweet features came in dreams.

Years passed; the storms that life engenders
dispersed my former hopes of grace
and I forgot those accents tender,
the heavenly beauty of your face.

And in my dark incarceration
my days passed like the clouds above,
bereft alike of inspiration,
of tears, of life itself, of love.

My soul awoke to new existence,
again you stood before me there,
a vision lasting but an instant,
true beauty's spirit, pure and rare.

My heart relives the old sensation
and once more steal down from above,
God's benediction, inspiration,
and tears, and life itself and love. ~ Alexander Pushkin

Sergei recited a Pushkin poem in Russian while I recited a stanza by Racine from my French classical repertoire. Both of us, romantics at heart, were inebriated by the fresh air, the calm and the greenery surrounding us, and we decided to ride to a village where we could taste the local food and wash it down with beer for Sergei and tea for me. ~ Liliane Willens

...she knew from school that that sort of literature was boring: Gorky was correct but somehow ponderous; Mayakovsky was very correct but somehow awkward; Saltykov-Shchedrin was progressive, but you could die yawning if you tried to read him through; Turgenev was limited to his nobleman's ideals; Goncharov was associated with the beginnings of Russian capitalism; Lev Tolstoi came to favor patriarchal peasantry - and their teacher did not recommend reading Tolstoi's novels because they were very long and only confused the clear critical essays written about him. And then they reviewed a batch of writers totally unknown to anyone: Dostoyevsky, Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, and Sukhovo-Kobylin. It was true that one did not even have to remember the titles of their works. In all this long procession, only Pushkin shone like a sun. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Я пережил свои желанья / I've lived to bury my desires

Я пережил свои желанья,
Я разлюбил свои мечты;
Остались мне одни страданья,
Плоды сердечной пустоты.

I've lived to bury my desires
and see my dreams corrode with rust
now all that's left are fruitless fires
that burn my empty heart to dust. ~ Alexander Pushkin

So meanwhile, friends, enjoy your blessing:
This fragile life that hurries so!
Its worthlessness needs no professing,
And I'm not loathe to let it go;
I've closed my eyes to phantoms gleaming,
Yet distant hopes within me dreaming
Still stir my heart at times to flight:
I'd grieve to quit this world's dim light
And leave no trace, however slender.
I live, I write - not seeking fame;
And yet, I think, I'd wish to claim
For my sad lot its share of splendour -
At least one note to linger long,
Recalling, like some friend, my song. ~ Alexander Pushkin

Now acting proud and now submissive,
By turns attentive and dismissive!
How languid, when no word he said,
How fiery, when he spoke, instead,
In letters of the heart how casual! ~ Alexander Pushkin

Moral maxims are surprisingly useful on occasions when we can invent little else to justify our actions. ~ Alexander Pushkin

We can all be clockmakers, or astronomers. But if we all wanted to be Pushkin ... if the question is, how do you make a poem by Pushkin?- or, what exactly makes one poem or painting or piece of music greater than another?- or, what is beauty?, or liberty?, or virtue?- if the question is, how should we live? ... then, reason gives no answer or different answers. So something went wrong. The divine spark in man is not reason after all, but something else, some kind of intuition or vision, perhaps like the moment of inspiration experienced by the artist ... ~ Tom Stoppard

Try to be forgotten. Go live in the country. Stay in mourning for two years, then remarry, but choose somebody decent. ~ Alexander Pushkin

No one who's lived and known reflection
Could help but scorn the human host.
No one who's sampled life's complexion
Could fail to fear his dead past's ghost. ~ Alexander Pushkin

Admittedly, his dinners consisted only of two or three courses, and were prepared by an ex-soldier, but the champagne flowed like water. ~ Alexander Pushkin

But really, this is no great sorrow, particularly, you'll agree, when wine's imported duty-free. ~ Alexander Pushkin

Blest who was youthful in his youth;
blest who matured at the right time;
who gradually the chill of life
with years was able to withstand;
who never was addicted to strange dreams;
who did not shun the fahsinable rabble;
who was at twenty fop or blade,
and then at thirty, profitably married;
who rid himself at fifty
of private and of other debts;
who fame, money, and rank
in due course calmly gained;
about whom lifelong one kept saying:
N. N. is an excellent man.

But it is sad to think that to no purpose
youth was given us,
that we betrayed it every hour,
that it duped us;
that our best wishes,
that our fresh dreamings,
in quick succession have decayed
like leaves in putrid autumn.
It is unbearable to see before one
only of dinners a long series,
to look on life as on a rite,
and in the wake of the decorous crowd
to go, not sharing with it
either general views, or passions. ~ Alexander Pushkin

Love is for every age auspicious,
But for the virginal and young
Its impulses are more propitious
Like vernal storms on meadows sprung:
They freshen in the rain of passion,
Ripening in their renovation –
And life, empowered, sends up shoots
Of richest blooms and sweetest fruits.
But at a late age, dry and fruitless,
The final stage to which we're led,
Sad is the trace of passions dead:
Thus storms in autumn, cold and ruthless,
Transform the field into a slough,
And strip the trees from root to bough. ~ Alexander Pushkin

As Pushkin put it: He had no itch to dig for glories deep in the dirt that time has laid. ~ Haruki Murakami

He expressed unconditional agreement with the uselessness and absurdity of the word 'fatherland'; he agreed with the idea that religion was harmful;33 but he loudly and firmly asserted that boots were inferior to Pushkin,34 ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

This, then, is the fate of your sons,
Oh Rome, oh celebrated power!
Singer of love, singer of the gods,
Tell me, what is glory?
A hollow rumbling from the grave, a praising voice,
A sound speeding from generation to generation?
Or under the shade of a smoky shelter
The tale of a wild gypsy? ~ Alexander Pushkin

The wondrous moment of our meeting...
Still I remember you appear
Before me like a vision fleeting,
A beauty's angel pure and clear.

In hopeless ennui surrounding
The worldly bustle, to my ear
For long your tender voice kept sounding,
For long in dreams came features dear.

Time passed. Unruly storms confounded
Old dreams, and I from year to year
Forgot how tender you had sounded,
Your heavenly features once so dear.

My backwoods days dragged slow and quiet --
Dull fence around, dark vault above --
Devoid of God and uninspired,
Devoid of tears, of fire, of love.

Sleep from my soul began retreating,
And here you once again appear
Before me like a vision fleeting,
A beauty's angel pure and clear.

In ecstasy my heart is beating,
Old joys for it anew revive;
Inspired and God-filled, it is greeting
The fire, and tears, and love alive. ~ Alexander Pushkin

With womankind, the less we love them, the easier they become to charm. ~ Alexander Pushkin

Я помню чудное мгновенье:
Передо мной явилась ты,
Как мимолётное виденье,
Как гений чистой красоты...

I still recall the wondrous moment
When you appeared before my eyes,
Just like a fleeting apparition,
Just like pure beauty's distillation... ~ Alexander Pushkin

Thus heaven's gift to us is this:
That habit takes the place of bliss. ~ Alexander Pushkin

What is renoun?more false than hope by dreams engendered. ~ Alexander Pushkin

Pushkin wrote Turkish poems and he was never in Turkey. ~ Ilya Ilf

Moscow ... how many strains are fusing in that one sound, for Russian hearts! what store of riches it imparts! ~ Alexander Pushkin

Whom then to love? Whom to have faith in?
Who can there be who won't betray?
Who'll judge a deed or disputation
Obligingly by what we say?
Who'll not bestrew our path with slander?
Who'll cosset us with care and candour?
Oh, ineffectual phantom seeker
You waste your energy in vain:
Love your own self, be your own man,
My worthy, venerable reader!
A worthwhile object: surely who
Could be more lovable than you? ~ Alexander Pushkin

But whom to love?
To trust and treasure?
Who won't betray us in the end?
And who'll be kind enough to measure
Our words and deeds as we intend? ~ Alexander Pushkin

The "laughter through tears of sorrow" that Pushkin noted elsewhere in his work is precisely laughter. The images it produces are too deeply ambiguous to bear any social message. ~ Nikolai Gogol

Two fixed ideas can no more exist together in the moral world than two bodies can occupy one and the same place in the physical world. ~ Alexander Pushkin

Better the illusions that exalt us than ten thousand truths. ~ Alexander Pushkin

It's hard to say something about Pushkin to a person who doesn't know anything about him. Pushkin is a great poet. Napoleon is not as great as Pushkin. Bismarck compared to Pushkin is a nobody. And the Alexanders, First, Second and Third, are just little kids compared to Pushkin. In fact, compared to Pushkin, all people are little kids, except Gogol. Compared to him, Pushkin is a little kid.
And so, instead of writing about Pushkin, I would rather write about Gogol.
Although, Gogol is so great that not a thing can be written about him, so I'll write about Pushkin after all.
Yet, after Gogol, it's a shame to have to write about Pushkin. But you can't write anything about Gogol. So I'd rather not write anything about anyone. ~ Daniil Kharms

There yet remains but one concluding tale, And then this chronicle of mine is ended Fulfilled, the duty God ordained to me, A sinner. Not without purpose did the Lord Put me to witness much for many years And educate me in the love of books. One day some indefatigable monk Will find my conscientious, unsigned work; Like me, he will light up his ikon-lamp And, shaking from the scroll the age-old dust, He will transcribe these tales in all their truth. ~ Alexander Pushkin

It's a lucky man who leaves early from life's banquet, before he's drained to the dregs his goblet - full of wine; yes, it's a lucky man who has not read life's novel to the end, but has been wise enough to part with it abruptly - like me with my Onegin. ~ Alexander Pushkin

Mistress-like, its brilliance vain, highly capricious and inane ... ~ Alexander Pushkin

The most important thing is spiritual labor...Books...You can wear the same suit for twenty years, two coats are enough for a lifetime, but you can't live without Pushkin or the complete works of Gorky. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

It's now the British Muse's fables That lie on maidens' bedside tables And haunt their dreams. They worship now The Vampire with his pensive brow, ~ Alexander Pushkin

I've lived to bury my desires
and see my dreams corrode with rust
now all that's left are fruitless fires
that burn my empty heart to dust.
Struck by the clouds of cruel fate
My crown of Summer bloom is sere
Alone and sad, I watch and wait
And wonder if the end is near.
As conquered by the last cold air
When Winter whistles in the wind
Alone upon a branch that's bare
A trembling leaf is left behind. ~ Alexander Pushkin

I taught myself Russian, which was very, very useful, especially for poetry and in fact if you can't read Pushkin in Russian, you're really missing something. ~ Clive James

Я вас любил.../I loved you once...

Я вас любил: любовь еще, быть может
В душе моей угасла не совсем;
Но пусть она вас больше не тревожит;
Я не хочу печалить вас ничем.
Я вас любил безмолвно, безнадежно,
То робостью, то ревностью томим;
Я вас любил так искренно, так нежно,
Как дай вам бог любимой быть другим.

I loved you once: perhaps that love has yet
To die down thoroughly within my soul;
But let it not dismay you any longer;
I have no wish to cause you any sorrow.
I loved you wordlessly, without a hope,
By shyness tortured, or by jealousy.
I loved you with such tenderness and candor
And pray God grants you to be loved that way again. ~ Alexander Pushkin