Quotes by Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy

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Art has always, in all ages and epochs, been a weapon of class struggle, both for the class consolidating its power and for the class preparing to come to power. It retained this function both when it reflected the process of struggle, and when it painted ages of decay and decay, when it mirrored great sunsets, when it struck direct blows, when it became the consolation of the vanquished.

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The place of the artist... is in the heat of battle, where, in the agony, a new world is born.

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The task of the artist, as we understand it in the current segment of history, is to extract from reality the typical elements, which the reader's eye can notice, to synthesize ideas, facts, contradictions in vivid and dynamic images and at the same time show the way real development towards a concrete future. We ask the artist to be history, philosopher, politician, organizer of life and harbinger of the future. The artist is the builder of the soul life of mankind.

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Art means participation in the process of life, in the unfolding of the most intense phenomena of our life.

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Art fulfills a function similar to that of memory; she chooses from the flow of time the most meaningful, most emotional, most important things and crystallizes these impressions in the pages of books. But the art doesn't stop there. It tends not only to depict the perspective of the past era, but also to reveal to us the horizon of life, to introduce us to the future... All the pathos of our life is in the future.

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Writers, throw yourself fearlessly into the flow of life, touch things with your own hands, experience human tragedies yourself in work, in struggle, in victories and failures.

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Fiction is sometimes stronger than reality, stronger than truth itself... You cannot write without resorting to fiction. Literature in its entirety is a fabrication, because life is dispersed in plan, in space, in time... It gathers from life certain aspects, an infinite number of scattered facts, and, controlling them, ends up making a realistic work with much more important than life itself.

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The ultimate goal of our literature is to discover human genius under the conditions of a higher form of social freedom.