Folklore of the Right

They [the Bolsheviks] aren’t happy with anything that’s on less than a world scale. For them transitional periods, worlds in the making, are an end in themselves. They aren’t trained for anything else; they don’t know anything except that. And do you know why these never-ending preparations are so futile? It’s because these men haven’t any real capacities, they are incompetent. Man is born to live, not prepare for life. Life itself, the phenomenon of life, the gift of life, is so breathtakingly serious/ So why substitute this childish harlequinade of immature fantasies, these schoolboy escapades?-Boris pasternak in Doctor Zhivago

The Boris Pasternak story, you will be astonished to learn if you are a reader of the right-wing monthly, American Opinion, is “just another psychological trick of the Kremlin’s propaganda machine.” Moscow “planned the whole affair”-and we “are the suckers falling for it!” Anyone who has a good word for Doctor Zhivago is “soft in the head.”

EL

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Eugene Lyons

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They [the Bolsheviks] aren’t happy with anything that’s on less than a world scale. For them transitional periods, worlds in the making, are an end in themselves. They aren’t trained for anything else; they don’t know anything except that. And do you know why these never-ending preparations are so futile? It’s because these men haven’t any real capacities, they are incompetent. Man is born to live, not prepare for life. Life itself, the phenomenon of life, the gift of life, is so breathtakingly serious/ So why substitute this childish harlequinade of immature fantasies, these schoolboy escapades?-Boris pasternak in Doctor Zhivago

The Boris Pasternak story, you will be astonished to learn if you are a reader of the right-wing monthly, American Opinion, is “just another psychological trick of the Kremlin’s propaganda machine.” Moscow “planned the whole affair”-and we “are the suckers falling for it!” Anyone who has a good word for Doctor Zhivago is “soft in the head.”