Mikhail Epstein > Quotes

“Other feelings too can be philosophical—pain, grief, tedium, delight, exultation—if they are experienced on behalf of humankind. “I looked around me, and my soul became wounded by the suffering of mankind” is the opening of Alexander Radishchev’s “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” (1790), which laid the foundation of all subsequent Russian philosophy. It is a philosophy shaped by feelings of suffering and compassion, by the Karamazovian question of how to justify a child’s tears. The range of philosophical feelings is wide.”
― Mikhail Epstein

“Events specially staged to demonstrate the reality of that which doesn’t exist stand out in the particular detail in which they are described. No one really knows, for example, whether the harvests reported in Stalin’s or Brezhnev’s Russia were ever actually reaped, but the fact that the number of tilled hectares or tons of milled grain was always reported down to the tenth of a percent gave these simulacra the character of hyperreality. [...] In this sense, the ideology was accurate—it was describing itself. And any reality that differed from the ideology simply ceased to exist—it was replaced by hyperreality, which trumpeted its existence by newspaper and loudspeaker and was much more tangible and reliable than anything else. In the Soviet land, “fairy tale became fact,” as in that American paragon of hyperreality, Disneyland, where reality itself is designed as a “land of imagination.”
― Mikhail Epstein, After the Future