Цитаты из книг — Леа Ипи

I asked my grandmother what it was. She explained that they smelled of sun cream, a thick white liquid used to protect people from the sun. “We don’t have it,” she said. “We use olive oil. It’s healthier.”

But the counterprotesters could not halt the course of events. Like people hanging off cliffs, they clung to the few remaining symbols of the country’s Communist legacy. They feared the future too, in part. But unlike my family, many of them still identified with the past. The Party had always spoken in their name and…

The tourist children had bright, unusual toys that looked so different from ours that we sometimes wondered if they were toys at all. They splashed around on floating mattresses displaying characters we had never seen, had strangely shaped buckets and spades and exotic plastic material we had no word for. They smelled…

For my part, I felt a mixture of pride and embarrassment: pride because I would soon start school, and embarrassment because I was still unable to pronounce collectivization. I had kept trying since we’d left the Central Party Committee building, and I’d kept on getting it wrong. When Mihal asked me to sing a song in…

During that trip to Athens, something felt different. When we stared at old photographs of people who were long dead and whom she had loved, I felt indifferent. Those people, who were supposed to be my relatives and ancestors, meant little to me.

I did not feel free at all. I felt especially constrained in the winter. It got dark early, and I was not allowed to go outside after the sun had set. “You’ll get into trouble,” my parents would say, without feeling the need to specify what kind of trouble they anticipated, just as I didn’t feel the need to ask them to…

But if there was one lesson to take away from the history of my family, and of my country, it was that people never make history under circumstances they choose. It is easy to say, “What you had was not the real thing,” applying that to both socialism and liberalism, to any complex hybrid of ideas and reality. It releases…

Everything that went wrong on my side of the world could be explained by the cruelty of our leaders or the uniquely backward nature of our institutions. They believed there was little for them to learn. There was no risk of repeating the same mistakes, no reason to ponder what had been achieved, and why it had been…

Like many in his generation, he was more preoccupied by freedom of thought, the right to protest, the possibility of living in accordance with one’s moral conscience.

“Oh, well,” they would say. “We survived the Turks. We survived the Fascists and the Nazis. We survived the Soviets and the Chinese. We’ll survive the World Bank.” He was terrified of forgetting what that survival had cost.

Unlike my mother, who thought that human beings were naturally inclined to harm one another, he believed that there was a kernel of goodness in everyone, and that the only reason it failed to emerge was that we lived in the wrong societies.

“Civil society” was the new term recently added to the political vocabulary, more or less as a substitute for “Party.” It was known that civil society had brought the Velvet Revolution to Eastern Europe.

My grandmother was not nostalgic for her past. She had no desire to return to a world in which her aristocratic family spoke French and visited the opera while the servants who prepared her meals and cleaned her clothes could not read or write. She had never been a Communist, she said, but nor did she long for the ancien…

Executing leaders, imprisoning spies, or sanctioning former Party members would have fuelled the conflicts even further, sharpening the desire for revenge, spilling more blood. It seemed more sensible to erase responsibility altogether, to pretend everyone had been innocent all along.

She wanted me to remember her trajectory, and to understand that she was the author of her life: that despite all the obstacles she had encountered on the way, she had remained in control of her fate. She had never ceased to be responsible.

He tried to recall the names of all the people who worked in the port, even though there were hundreds of them. “If I forget their names, I will forget about their lives,” he said. “They will no longer be people; they’ll become numbers. Their aspirations, their fears will no longer matter. We will only remember the rules,…

The world he wanted to see was always different from the one he lived in. When he noticed the beginnings of a movement that resisted the way things were, he thought there was promise. But as soon as that movement became concrete, as soon as it had its own leaders, its own set of constraints and conventions, as soon as it…

At one point in his life, he had figured out that irony was more than a rhetorical device; it was a mode of survival.