The latest literary discussions reflect a struggle between two artistic methods - romanticism and realism, with the latter clearly ascendant for the time being.

None of us older writers had gone through such a school. We are all self-taught. And, of course, there is always, in such a school, the danger of goose-stepping, uniformed ranks. But the Serapion Brethren have already, it seems to me, outgrown this danger. Each of them has his own individuality and his own handwriting. The common thing they have derived from the studio is the art of writing with ninety-proof ink, the art of eliminating everything that is superfluous, which is, perhaps, more difficult than writing.

Individual consciousness is just sickness.

Dogma, static positions, consonance - all these are obstacles to catching the disease of art, at least in its more complex forms.

Here I saw, with my own eyes, that laughter was the most terrible weapon: you can kill anything with laughter - even murder itself.

We have lived through the epoch of suppression of the masses; we are living in an epoch of suppression of the individual in the name of the masses; tomorrow will bring the liberation of the individual - in the name of man.

Is it not clear, however, that bliss and envy are the numerator and denominator of the fraction called happiness?