Author of quotes: Semyon Vladimirovich Pegov

All these wonderful names, all these brilliant guys - Konstantin Simonov, Yevgeny Dolmatovsky, Boris Slutsky - military men, political leaders, fighters - they felt under themselves, above themselves, around themselves the war, and not only the Great Patriotic War, they all began earlier, on all sorts of "annexations" - and the country itself through the war learned. For Russian literature, such behavior was common. "There will be a war - I will go to war," Chekhov wrote. Naturally, he would have gone as a doctor, as, say, in his time Konstantin Leontiev. In this sense, something broke recently: I didn't even really notice when. Okay, pacifists would come out from everywhere - these at least have beliefs - no, some new, amazing creatures: poets outside politics, outside the war - well, it seems like it's not their royal business to pay attention to all sorts of machine gun crackling there. Can you imagine Pushkin, or Blok, or Yesenin, who would say about themselves that they are "out of politics"? Yes, even Brodsky. Outside politics, outside the empire, out of confrontation. Where then?