Andrei Bitov: Pushkin House

Unreality is a condition of life.


"...But what am I getting at? Why don't you hate the fact that we were forced to grab hold of the same log, the fact that we were cast up on the same island, berthed on the same ship! Why hate me in place of everyone? Here, here!" Mitishatyev jumped up. "These walls here, this banality, these dead men! Whom we, the living, exploit! This age, which forces us to know everything about each other! Because we do know everything! We know so terribly much about each other that--never mind hatred, I can't see why we didn't kill each other, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago! We live on each other, we go to the same latrine, gobble the same corpse of Russian literature and take away the taste of it with the same fixed dinner menu, we use the same monthly ticket to ride the same bus to the same apartment and watch the same TV, drink the same vodka, and use the same newspaper to wrap our solitary herring! Why do you put up with all this, and not with poor little me?"