Leandro Apostol’s Reviews > Pushkin's Children: Writing on Russia and Russians – Passionate Essays on Culture, Politics, and the Soul > Status Update

Thousands of miles of railroad are rusty and overgrown with weeds : they built the railway and only later realized it had nowhere to go and nothing to transport. The greatness of Russian thought lies not in its precision but in its scale, not in the details but in the strength, not in the realization but in the idea.

Characteristic of the Russian dreamer's mentality are impatience, a very particular sort of impracticality, disdain for exactitude, and dismissal of details.

For Russia is broader and more diverse, stranger and more contradictory, than any idea of it. It resists all theories about what makes it tick, confounds all the paths to its possible transformation. One can describe and explain Russia in a thousand ways, but as soon as the theorist and the dreamer lays down his pen, satisfied at last with his description, diabolical laughter will sound from the emptiness behind him

The people in theory always diverge dramatically from the people in reality; and the horror of this truth is sooner or later discovered by everyone who pretends to the people's spiritual leadership, by everyone who knows how things should and should not be done.

Russia lives some life of its own, a strange, fantastical life where the pitiful and the paltry mix with the great, where paradoxes are the norm and harmony is attainable only in verse, where life breaks through in any form it can.

"Dreams of France are an old Russian tradition. A Frenchman doesn't dream of France for obvious reasons : he lives there. Other foreigners, if they dream, are pragmatic : you can save your money and take a trip. The Russian locked for for decades behind the Iron Curtain ... the Russian has developed a capacity for reverie unlike anyone else's."

"the Russian has developed a capacity for reverie unlike anyone else's. The climate, the regime, and the huge distances facilitate lethargy and dream. There, beyond the horizon. beyond the undulating steppe of the forests of fir trees, beyond the endless snowy expanses, far, far away, there is of course, the marvelous country of Paris..."

Tolstaya's image-laden analyses and digressions into the Russian psyche is amazing!