Sylvain Tesson

Fifteen kinds of ketchup. That’s the sort of thing that made me want to withdraw from this world

It’s funny: you decide to live in a cabin, and envision yourself smoking a cigar under the open sky, lost in meditation… and you wind up checking off items on supply lists like an army quartermaster. Life comes down to grocery shopping

. In Russia, Formica reigns supreme. Seventy years of historical materialism have obliterated the Russian sense of aesthetics. Where does bad taste come from? Why use linoleum at all? How did kitsch take over the world? The principal phenomenon of globalization has been a worldwide embrace of the ugly. If you need convincing, just walk around a Chinese village, check out the latest decor in French post offices, or consider what tourists wear. Bad taste is the common denominator of humanity.

I already knew that one must never travel with books related to one’s destination; in Venice, read Lermontov, but at Baikal, Byron

The Romans built for the ages; a Russian just wants to get through the winter

When you have misgivings about the poverty of your inner life, it’s important to bring along good books to fill that void in a pinch. The mistake would be to choose only difficult reading on the assumption that life in the woods would keep your spiritual temperature at fever pitch, but time drags when all you’ve got for snowy afternoons is Hegel

Volodya watches us in consternation. He does not see that the bare, amber-coloured wood is more beautiful to the eye than oilcloth. He listens as I explain this to him. I am the bourgeois defending the superiority of a parquet floor over linoleum. Aestheticism is a form of reactionary deviance.

Russians make a clean sweep of the past, but not of their refuse. Throw something away? I’d rather die, they say. Why toss out a tractor engine when the piston might make a good lamp base? The territory of the former Soviet Union is littered with the crud of Five-Year Plans: factories in ruins, machine tools, the carcasses of planes. Many Russians live in places that resemble building sites and car scrapyards. They do not see rubbish, ignoring the spectacle before them. When you live on a dump, you need to know how to edit things out

Russians always build things with a sense of urgency, as if fascist soldiers were about to pour over the hill at any minute

LIST OF IDEAL READING MATERIAL CAREFULLY COMPOSED IN PARIS FOR A SIX-MONTH STAY IN THE SIBERIAN FOREST