Status Updates From Не стреляйте белых лебедей

I better finish this book before my vacation. It’s poetic, sometimes, but the story itself just isn’t it for me…

1/3😫 it’s getting interesting, but I’m still confused 80% of the time

Uhm I don’t understand shit

“Evil breeds evil, that we know well, but the fact that good is born of good we seem to forget.”

Camper, beware!
In the forest take care,
with fire do not play,
for we are here to stay,
The forest we must roam—
the forest is our home.

How many wishes to do good is a person allotted in life? How many times can he, downtrodden and ridiculed, rise again, smile at his work once more, tackle it with enthusiasm? How many? Who knows?

” When a person’s hard to understand, the easiest thing to do is declare him a crank.”

” Man rests, animals rest, the land rests. Everyone needs to rest, and not for the pleasure of it, but to store up energy.”

Each man cures whatever he’s got that hurts.

“Every tree, son, has some use: Mother Nature doesn’t like good-for-nothings. One tree grows for men—for his needs—while another grows for the forest—for all kinds of critters. And that’s why, before you go swinging your axe, ya gotta look around to make sure you’re not harming anyone: an elk or a hare, a mushroom or a squirrel or a hedgehog. If you hurt them, you’ll be hurting yourself.”

“And the devil led him astray…And why do you suppose?”
“Because they look for everything on the outside! And evil—it’s in a person, it’s inside.”
“And what else is inside a person?”
“His stomach! Evil comes from his stomach! Each guy worries about his stomach and hurts everyone all around him.”

An innocent kid ruminates on evil with his primary school teacher!

“You’ll never get married, Nona!”
“Why do you say that?”
“You spend an awful lot on books. Give yourself a break: men don’t like the bookish type.”

😂🤣😂

“Man suffers. Suffers a lot, my dear, kind friends. Why? Because we’re all orphans, we are. Out of sorts with mother earth, in a row with father forest, in bitter separation from sister river. And there’s nothing to stand on, nothing to lean against, and nothing to refresh ourselves with. And this goes especially for you, my dear, kind friends. You suffer the most and the sky above you is grey. Ours is blue.”

“Beauty—do you mean to tell me beauty is when everything’s the same? Beauty is when everything’s different! And how can we get by without beauty? Without beauty there’s no festivity.”

“God forbid, reach for his bottle🍾. And wherever there’s one bottle🍾, there’s bound to be a second, and where there’s a second, there is always disgrace.”👌

~ Boris Lvovich Vassilyev ( Don’t Shoot the White Swans 🦢)

#SovietFiction #SovietProse #LieutenantProse #Environment

“Your head and your hands and a knack, but most important, your heart. A man can move mountains with his heart. But if work is just for, well, just for puttin’ food on the table, it’ll slip right through your fingers. Just won’t come, son. And then your hands, they’re all thumbs, and your head’s just like an empty pot.”

“You gotta look through everything, my boy. Everything up top is lies.”

“And varied was his life—a life for himself and a life for people. But perhaps all lives are varied? Varied for oneself and varied for people? Only is there always a sum total in these variances? Appearing or being varied, are we always one in ourselves?”

Final novella: Don’t Shoot the White Swans

"He is always counting: apparently he was never taught to read books, to see films, to listen to music. Of all that is given to a man by contemporary civilization, he voluntarily chooses arithmetic. He adds, subtracts, multiplies, divides, but most frequently of all he adds, 100 to 100, 10 to 10, ruble to ruble. Yes, ruble to ruble."

End of The Trial. Brilliant courtroom novella❣️👌❤️

"Generally speaking, we are all human. Some are honest, some are dishonest, some treasure their own health, others treasure someone else's, isn't that so?"

"The frontiers of lawbreaking are defined by the moral background of the personality. Not by knowledge of the criminal code—professional criminals know that no worse than any lawyer!😂— but by the inexplicable, invisible, but so easily sensed threshold of morality."👌❣️