The Great Geniuses of Russia
Before visiting the country for the first time in 2002, I had no interest in Russia. Perhaps because I grew up during the Cold War and believed Russia was a harsh and dangerous nation. Pictures portrayed a land perennially bathed in drab gray wash. How wrong I was. Russia is a fascinating, colorful country, and the great geniuses of Russia are some of the most brilliant minds and artists who ever lived.
THE GREAT LITERARY GENIUSES OF RUSSIA
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky 1821 – 1881
The author of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov was sentenced to death for anti-government activities in 1849. Fortunately, a last minute reprieve saved him from the firing squad. However he was sent to a Siberian labor camp for 4 years.
The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.
To love someone means to see him as God intended him.
To live without Hope is to Cease to live.
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy 1828 – 1910
Considered one of the greatest writers of all time, Leo Tolstoy is best known for War and Peace and Anna Karenina.
If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness and truth.
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
Joy can only be real if people look upon their life as a service and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness.
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak 1890 – 1960
Best known for the Russian Revolution romantic drama Dr. Zhivago. Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1958 but the Soviet Union refused to allow him to accept it. In 1988, his descendants claimed it for him.
Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary. As for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth.
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn 1918 – 2008
Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. His books include One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward and Gulag Archipelago.
How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand one who’s cold?
The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all.
The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.
THE GREAT MUSICAL GENIUSES OF RUSSIA
Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff 1873 – 1943
What is music? How do you define it? Music is a calm moonlit night, the rustle of leaves in Summer. Music is the far off peal of bells at dusk! Music comes straight from the heart and talks only to the heart: it is Love!
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky 1840 – 1893
If that considiton of mind and soul, which we call inspiration, lasted long without intermission, no artist could survive it. The strings would break and the instrument be shattered into fragments.
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky 1882 – 1971
To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.
Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?
