Status Updates From Zgomotul timpului

I do like this, but maybe it’s just because I’m al tired, all the jumping around between paragraphs to different points in his life is making it difficult to follow occasionally

“Death cures the hunchback” goes so hard (in the most despicable way possible)

Some nice pithy little aphorisms in this chapter on the nature and purpose of art if there is one, and what it means to people

“…he had always believed that love, as a force of nature, was indestructible; and that, threatened, it could be protected, blanketed, swaddled in irony. Now he was less convinced. Tyranny had become so expert at destroying that why should it not destroy love as well, intentionally or not? […] And so, it was not just an anxiety, but often a brute fear that he experienced: […] that love's last days had come.”

“Sarcasm was dangerous to its user, identifiable as the language of the wrecker and the saboteur. But irony — perhaps, some-times, so he hoped — might enable you to preserve what you valued, even as the noise of time became loud enough to knock out window-panes. What did he value? Music, his family, love. Love, his family, music. The order of importance was liable to change. Could irony protect his music?”

“When truth-speaking became impossible — because it led to immediate death — it had to be disguised. In Jewish folk music, despair is disguised as the dance. And so, truth's disguise was irony. Because the tyrant's ear is rarely tuned to hear it. […]
But this was not an ideal world, and so irony grew in sudden and strange ways. Overnight, like a mushroom; disastrously, like a cancer.”

“Because, though tyranny might be paranoid, it was not necessarily stupid. If it were stupid, it would not survive; just as if it had principles, it would not survive. Tyranny understood how some parts - the weak parts - of most people worked. It had spent years killing priests and closing churches, but if soldiers fought more stubbornly under the blessing of priests, then priests would be brought back […].”

“Fear: what did those who inflicted it know? They knew that it worked, even how it worked, but not what it felt like. ‘The wolf cannot speak of the fear of the sheep’x as they say. […] Never a mass arrest; just one victim, and then the next night another — a system which ramped up the fear for those who remained, who had temporarily survived.”

“He did not want to make himself into a dramatic character. But sometimes […] he thought: so this is what history has come to. All that striving and idealism and hope and progress and science and art and conscience, and it all ends like this, with a man standing by a lift, at his feet a small case containing cigarettes, underwear and tooth powder; standing there and waiting to be taken away.”

“Nowadays, in the most advanced society on earth, the parents might pay for the sins of the child, along with uncles, aunts, cousins, in-laws, colleagues, friends, and even the man who unthinkingly smiled at you as he came out of the lift at three in the morning. The system of retribution had been greatly improved, and was so much more inclusive than it used to be.”

Twice in one chapter the very “this is the way things have always been!” revisionism! Very Soviet :)

Barnes clearly has an appreciation for composers because half the time I have no fucking idea what he’s talking about

I rewatched The Death of Stalin today, and while trying to find locations where it had been filmed I discovered the score had been written deliberately to imitate Dmitri Shostakovich.

It was at that point that I realised Dmitri Dmitriyevitch was in fact THAT Dmitri, and this book has been about a real person the entire time 🙃

„As a child, he had feared the dead — feared that they would rise from their graves and seize hold of him, dragging him back into the cold, black earth, his mouth and eyes filling with soil. This fear had slowly disappeared, because the hands of the living had turned out to be more frightening. […]

But then there was the opposite fear: of slipping from hands that kept you safe.“

I’m liking the satire of Soviet structure (if it can be thought of as that) and the inherent ridiculous of trying to quantify creativity. Sometimes it is getting a bit confusing when they switch between formal and familiar names, and it can be hard to take character with names like Sergey Sergeyovitch seriously, even if that is what they’d be called. I’m also not sure if some of the names are real famous people

Still fun, quite liking it. Contrasting the harsh bureaucracy of Soviet life against Dmitri’s artistic integrity is a nice solid cord to build around. Still jumping all around time-wise, and the non-linear approach works well with mini-cliffhangers before it jumps about again