Russian Literature Quotes

I cannot stand Tolstoy, and reading him was the most boring literary duty I ever had to perform, his philosophy and his sense of life are not merely mistaken, but evil, and yet, from a purely literary viewpoint, on his own terms, I have to evaluate him as a good writer.

The real 19th century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx.

The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are then I want to be a novelist.

Out of Dostoevsky: Kafka. Out of Tolstoy: Margaret Mitchell. (in conversation, explaining his dislike for Tolstoy)

I've been wondering about Dostoyevsky. How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?

I took a 19th-century Russian novel class in college and have been smitten with Russian literature ever since. Writers like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Grossman, and Solzhenitsyn tackle the great questions of morality, politics, love, and death.

Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist, more than Gauss.

I first read War And Peace about 100 years after Tolstoy wrote it.

My father was a teacher of the Russian language and literature in high school.

I am trying to concentrate on books. You know, I love Dostoevsky; he's my favourite writer.

I am a writer. I am rooted in Tolstoy, I am rooted in Homer, I am rooted in Cervantes.

I can see why the Russians love Robert Burns, I think that Russians and Koreans have a very similar outlook to Scots.

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.

At NSD, I had an amazing experience learning everything from stagecraft to western drama and Shakespeare, Maxim Gorky, Anton Chekov.

Whenever you are unhappy ... go to Russia. Anyone who has come to understand that country well will find himself content to live nowhere else.

When we remove the snowdrift piled up over Chekhov in recent years, we uncover a man profoundly agitated by social problems; a writer whose social ideals are the same as those we live by; a philosophy of the divinity of man, of fervent faith in man - the faith that moves mountains.

The truly great books are always novels: 'Anna Karenina,' 'The Brothers Karamazov,' 'The Magic Mountain.' Just as with 'Shahnameh,' I browse these books from time to time to remember how a great book works on us or to teach my students at Columbia University.

When I bought a collection of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, I returned home with a bright enthusiasm to begin the long march into the Russian soul. Though I've failed to read either man to completion, they both helped me to imagine that my fictional South Carolina was as vast a literary acreage as their Russia.

I have to admit that I only read 'War and Peace' when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then.

The book that made me decide to go into Russian literature was 'Anna Karenina,' which I first read in high school. The thing that appealed to me and constituted its Russianness for me was that it was simultaneously incredibly funny and sad.

War and Peace maddens me because I didn't write it myself, and worse, I couldn't.

Like almost everything else from the West, the Romantic Revolution arrived late in Russia.

Of all my films, people wrote to me most about this one... ...I had wanted to make The Idiot long before Rashomon. Since I was little I've liked Russian literature, but I find that I like Dostoevsky the best and had long thought that this book would make a wonderful film. He is still my favourite author, and he is the one - I still think - who writes most honestly about human existence.

The poem that comes closest to saying what I think is the one in Human Wishes called "Rusia en 1931." This poem is about [Osip] Mandelstam, who was a great poet and an anti-Stalinist, and [Cesar] Vallejo, who was a great poet and a Stalinist.

I really wanted to go Russia. I'm really interested in Russian history, so I'd like to go and put a face to what I've read.