Quotes About Svetlana

I name the genre that I write in as 'novel of voices.'

She says she can't talk," Svetlana told me. "She's a botanist her name is Fernanda, so of course her nickname is Fern. It suits her because ferns are so mysterious and sort of elusive and ferns can survive anywhere.

By 1918 Nadya's letters hint that she has fallen in love with Stalin. Svetlana explains that Nadya "had only begun to grow when the Revolution broke out, whereas he [Stalin] was already a man nearly forty, an age of hardened scepticism and cold calculation and all the other qualities important in a politician.

Her reaction was in character. Svetlana was at heart a gambler. Throughout her life she would make a monumental decision entirely on impulse, and then ride the consequences with an almost giddy abandon. She always said her favorite story by Dostoyevsky was The Gambler.

Who can live without personal retrospect? We will always glance back to our childhood, for we are shaped deep in our core by the impress of our parents, and we will always wonder how that molding determined us. Svetlana willfully believed in her happy childhood, even as she gradually understood that it was secured by untold bloodshed. What was it about this strange childhood that she would always turn to it for solace?

In her private life, however, Svetlana continued to feel isolated. A friend at the time, Olga Kulikowsky, described her as "one of the loneliest women I have ever known."37 Another friend, Tatiana Tess, said, "Her search for happiness was boundless."38 A die-hard romantic, she longed to meet someone who wouldn't think of her as Stalin's daughter.

Svetlana always said that the notorious brutality of the Orthodox priests, who punished their students with solitary confinement for days in dungeonlike cells, had shaped her father's penchant for cruelty.

Svetlana entered wholeheartedly into Indian life, wearing a sari and eating the family's vegetarian food. She walked about the village and visited with Brajesh's old friends, but she had no illusions about the complexities and compromises of life in India. She found the caste system, with its seemingly ineradicable rules, disturbing.

but he was pleasantly surprised by Svetlana's tranquillity. She later said, "I had been trained not to make decisions for myself, to wait and to be patient, above all to remain well-mannered.

Last spring, months before we had to declare our majors, Svetlana had started soliciting advice from her parents and other old people.

Belarus is a closed, authoritarian system, and the theme of Chernobyl is also a closed topic.

The subjects I wanted to write about - the mystery of the human soul, evil - didn't interest newspapers, and news reporting bored me.