

“The poet Osip Mandelstam, in a poem that goes by various names, a celebrated first-anniversary commemoration of the start of 1917, speaks of 'liberty's dim light'. The word he uses, 'sumerki', usually portends twilight, but it may also refer to the darkness before dawn. Does he honour, his translator Boris Dralyuk wonders, 'liberty's fading light, or its first faint glimmer?'
Perhaps the glow at the horizon is neither of longer sunsets nor less sudden dawns, but is rather a protracted, constitutive ambiguity. Such crepuscularity we have all known, and will all know again. Such strange light is not only Russia's.”
― October: The Story of the Russian Revolution
Perhaps the glow at the horizon is neither of longer sunsets nor less sudden dawns, but is rather a protracted, constitutive ambiguity. Such crepuscularity we have all known, and will all know again. Such strange light is not only Russia's.”
― October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

“It would be absurd, a ridiculous myopia, to hold up October as a simple lens through which to view the struggles of today. But it has been a long century, a long dusk of spite and cruelty, the excrescence and essence of its time. Twilight, even remembered twilight, is better than no light at all. It would be equally absurd to say that there is nothing that we can learn from the revolution. To deny that the sumerki of October can be ours, and that it need not always be followed by night.”
― October: The Story of the Russian Revolution
― October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

“Morality is violence. An invisible violence at first. Love is a supreme violence, hidden deep in the darkness of our atoms. When a stream flows into a river, it’s love and it’s violence. When a cloud loses itself in the sky, it’s a marriage. When the roots of a tree split open a rock it’s the movement of life. When the sea rises and falls back only to rise again it’s the process of History. When a man and a woman find each other in the silence of the night, it’s the beginning of the end of the tribe’s power, and death itself becomes a challenge to the ascendancy of the group.”
― Sitt Marie Rose
― Sitt Marie Rose

“You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions.”
― "Exterminate All the Brutes": One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide
― "Exterminate All the Brutes": One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide

“IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WERE TWO NATIONS. ONE WAS A vast, mighty and magnificent empire, brilliantly organized and culturally unified, which dominated a massive swathe of the earth. The other was an undeveloped, semi-feudal realm, riven by religious factionalism and barely able to feed its illiterate, diseased and stinking masses. The first nation was India. The second was England.”
― Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire
― Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire
Shirsho’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at Shirsho’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
More friends…
Favorite Genres
Polls voted on by Shirsho
Lists liked by Shirsho