7 Quotes by Guillermo Erades

As we continued drinking, my understanding improved significantly. At some point I found myself totally immersed in the Russian conversation, almost unaware that I was speaking a foreign language. It was not that I knew more words, but I seemed more able to grasp the overall narrative – filling in the language gaps with my own drunken version of whatever was being said at the table.

Being wasted is a great way to visit a place for the first time, I realised – everything is illuminated in a special light and the impressions are much stronger.

I admired the way Anton Pavlovich didn’t seem so much interested in telling a story as in conveying a nastroeniye – a mood or atmosphere. Anton Pavlovich is the master of nastroeniye, Lyudmila Aleksandrovna had told me, and he certainly was, capturing in his writing the essence of late nineteenth-century Russia.

if you take Russians individually, one by one, they are the most honest people on Earth. They are so direct, so straightforward, they just can’t lie. Not in their genes. Russians can’t do hypocrisy, not like Westerners. That’s why they come across as rude. It’s not rudeness. It’s fucking honesty. But, shit, when it comes to the public sphere, that’s another story. Everything in this country is a big fucking lie

I had learned by now that, whenever confronted by a ‘how are you’ or ‘how are things’, Russians rarely answered with a simple ‘fine, thanks’. They saw the question not as a polite greeting formula, but as a welcome chance to enumerate the many problems life had recently dumped on them.

It struck me that the Russian word for compassion, sostradaniye, derived from the word suffering, stradaniye, and literally meant co-suffering. A compassionate person was, in Russian, a co-sufferer.

Russia is lost” she continued. “First we had God. Then we had Lenin. Now we have nothing.