Try to understand

Under communism will national characteristics remain?

No. They'll disappear.


That's too bad.

Why? We will enrich ourselves. you think the German or the French have no good qualities?


Then we will never have a new Pushkin, Tchaikovsky, or Surikov. It will be on international culture.

You can't limit your vision to what has already been created. It's time you learned to be more broad-minded. If you don't understand this you'll remain a narrow-minded, semicommunist Russian and nothing more. No one wants to take away your national identiy, but you will advance to a higher stage. If you remain where you are you'll become a good poet of the Russian Federation but not of the USSR. Tvardovsky fights for the Russian Poetry, and he is the best Russian Poet now. I remember him. He is very talented but narrow-minded. Like many of us he is limited to the Russian horizons where peasant life prevails -- which Marx called the idiocy of the village. The peasants' limitations shade into idiocy. The peasant likes narrow horizons, be he Russian, Georgian, or German. I had a little book which I picked up somewhere after war. It was the correspondence between Tchaikovsky and Taneev. Taneev admired Tchaikovsky's music and was proud of Russian culture. That's fine, said Tchaikovsky, but I also admire German, Italian, and French music. Wasn't he a nationalist? Very much so. But one doesn't limit oneself only to Russian. The most talented people never limit their field of vision. They add useful aspects from their neighbor's work. this is what's truly wonderful.

[12-12-72]



excerpt from Molotov remembers.