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music of the years
Went to the engineering library between exams today to study, but instead ended up re-reading Five Million Vodka Bottles to the Moon, the sort-of-memoir of astronomer Iosif Shklovsky.
I have a fondness for reading about his sort of people, the sort of people who live through great events and dark times just going on with their daily lives, career and family, affected by history but not *living* it. That's the sort of person I am, and, I think, that most people are.
Shklovsky was a Russian Jewish intellectual who endured two world wars and the worst years of the Soviet Union. He managed to avoid fighting in the wars or being involved in politics, he never starved or faced a stark moral choice or great personal ordeal. He was quietly cynical about communism and never exactly in the Party's good books, but the closest he came to being repressed was when one of his college roommates, the local government toady, decided to report him as a subversive for insulting him, a Party member.
Shklovsky reacted by giving him a signed paper which read, "I, Iosif Shklovsky, hereby certify that you are, indeed, an idiot." The informer ran in triumph to the local committee members with this incontrovertible evidence of guilt, who on reading it laughed and said, "He's right. You *are* an idiot." Whereupon that was the end of that.
Why do I find his picture of Soviet Russia so much more believable than Solzhenitsyn's or my history books' bleak portraits?
Anyway, those were my last exams until Saturday. I think I shall waste this evening revising stories and attempting to finally watch my HP:SS DVD.
I have a fondness for reading about his sort of people, the sort of people who live through great events and dark times just going on with their daily lives, career and family, affected by history but not *living* it. That's the sort of person I am, and, I think, that most people are.
Shklovsky was a Russian Jewish intellectual who endured two world wars and the worst years of the Soviet Union. He managed to avoid fighting in the wars or being involved in politics, he never starved or faced a stark moral choice or great personal ordeal. He was quietly cynical about communism and never exactly in the Party's good books, but the closest he came to being repressed was when one of his college roommates, the local government toady, decided to report him as a subversive for insulting him, a Party member.
Shklovsky reacted by giving him a signed paper which read, "I, Iosif Shklovsky, hereby certify that you are, indeed, an idiot." The informer ran in triumph to the local committee members with this incontrovertible evidence of guilt, who on reading it laughed and said, "He's right. You *are* an idiot." Whereupon that was the end of that.
Why do I find his picture of Soviet Russia so much more believable than Solzhenitsyn's or my history books' bleak portraits?
Anyway, those were my last exams until Saturday. I think I shall waste this evening revising stories and attempting to finally watch my HP:SS DVD.