From an interview
I have never been an opponent of communism, just real communism as it should be. Communism is the Kingdom of God on Earth. There are such things in life that when you comprehend them, when you encounter them, you understand - and after that it is very difficult to continue living, to remain - or become - a person. Apparently, most active people who become “soldiers of fortune,” mercenaries, climbers, drug addicts, and creative people in general belong to a similar state. The fourth and final state is fiery, which is already death. Or holiness. I believe that Christ is something inhuman. What he brought to Earth has very little to do with humanity. These are essentially inhuman truths. This has been proven by history. Christ brought love, in fact, from the point of view of modern Christianity, Christ was Satan, because he was, first of all, the Antichrist, that is, a person who carried complete freedom of choice, that is, what religion has never given and does not now gives. You know, I am very pessimistic - somehow I don’t believe (and especially after what has been done) that all of humanity will suddenly become wiser and begin to live differently. The only hope is that at least a few good people, LIVING people, will survive. But I think that they will simply arise as a new stage of evolution, maybe they will not be people at all. Life will still go on - there is no death. Do not lose hope and conscience, do not fall into the sin of despondency, do not lay down your arms, do not give up. Stop rotting alive in your cozy traps. Leave your dusty, musty corners - go out into the godless light, take a deep breath. The homeland is waiting for you - hopelessly young, desperate and rebellious. Demand and achieve the impossible! Step on the throat of your melancholy, apathy, laziness. Execute your fear. Act in such a way that Death flees from you in horror. The world is holding on - it’s still holding on! - on each of us - alive and invincible. And even if there are few of us - there have always been few of us - but it is we who have moved and are moving history, driving it forward along a shining spiral. Where there was no time, there is no time and there never will be. To eternity. So don’t disgrace yourself and your future. Get up! There is no tomorrow here. At any moment you can be beaten, robbed, tools thrown out the train window... They can pass some new law and deprive you of everything. At any moment they can imprison you, and even kill you without trial or investigation. - You, I see, don’t really favor citizens. Where does this hatred come from? - This is not only hatred, it is also panicked animal horror. And it’s not so much a fear of them, but rather a pathological rejection. It’s not even I who fear and hate—it’s something in me that fears and hates. All the time, when I walk down the street, it seems to me that I am not a person, but something like a Martian, disguised, made up, more or less successfully, as a citizen. And at any moment this mimicry, this fucker can reveal itself and then fuck it! I haven’t left the house without a weapon for a long time, and still I’m absolutely defenseless before them. I'm a stranger. Naturally, initially alien. Forever a stranger. And they all know it, they feel it like sharks’ blood. I am a stranger to all of them, and all their swollen joys and sorrows, ideals and vices, everything they live by and dream about are alien and extremely disgusting to me. This is my innate instinct. Here I am a saboteur, thrown into enemy territory. A sort of Stirlitz. For me, a person is initially NOTHING, he is shit in the hole, a fig in his pocket. However, he can, is capable of growing to the Great Above the Heavens, to Eternity - if, say, an Eternal Idea, an Eternal Truth, an Eternal system of values, coordinates - whatever you like - is formed behind him. That is, the entire value of an individual is equal to the value of the idea that he personifies, for which he is capable of dying - not even like that... - without which he CAN’T LIVE. Here we’re not even talking about an idea, but about an ESSENCE that is higher than all ideas, which, most likely, you don’t even choose. The true, REAL (I just like this word) for me is that which is IMPORABLE, imperishable - that which is FREE. The broader, freer the idea, the truer it is. For suddenly, at some blinding moment, I realized that all this sound conglomeration of the 80s - even the best examples of them (Joy Division, for example, or Scars) - is a pile of dung compared to the same Love , Doors, MC5, Stooges, Screamin Jay Hawkins, Troggs, Hendrix, Barrett... and with the same Shocking Blue! All this - the punk of the 80s, and the noise scene, and the Birthday Party, PIL of all kinds - all this is NOT REAL. Behind all this, except for swollen ambitions and mental and technical quirks, there is nothing. This is all puppetry, by and large, although there were (and always are) exceptions - Dead Kennedys, for example, or Dressed Up Animals. And then, in the 60s, especially in the States (England is still a puny country in terms of territory, and this actually means a lot), any crap team, like St. John Green or Crome Syrcus - with every note she proved that everything was not in vain. You listen, and you just want to say something like: This is so. And the main thing is that even formally (I’m just keeping quiet about the content and energy!) everything that Nicky Cave, Siouxsie, Leadons, Smiths, Strummers and the like scraped out of their heads, strained and puffing, is all contained with shit in the Velvet Underground, and in 13th Floor Elevators, and in Seeds, and in Kim Fowley, and in Texas garages, and in Detroit.
Quotes from the interview “Don’t feel sorry for people”
A well-mannered person plays the way he was raised. But we are uneducated people and can play jazz, rock, and punk. We can play both minimal music and noise. We buried many friends from our team. But people love life too much to be alive. “Too strange to live, too rare to die” - this is about us. Animals do not have the consciousness to comprehend death. Even children have it. Therefore, by and large, I don’t feel sorry for people. It’s just that a person is somehow protected by the consciousness of this end. But they don't. It’s just a form of shocking when you appear in public in such a state when it’s unclear how you can stand on your feet. This is also a certain destruction of the canons. We are by no means bespectacled intellectuals who sit at home, read smart books and listen to smart music. - Well, would you also prefer an unnatural ending? - You won’t wait.
Quotes from Letov
Prepared by: Dmitry Sirotkin
I present to you a selection of quotes from rock musician Yegor Letov (1964 - 2008).
Letov’s personality and work continue to arouse interest and controversy. This says a lot.
Quotes are grouped by topic: about yourself, people, music, life, citizenship, life ethics, “Civil Defense”, homeland, politics, love, death, religion, anarchy.
About Me
Since childhood, I didn’t like to take steps in steps - I always skipped.
It was never enough for me. I don’t understand the word “not bad” - it cancels out everything that’s fucked up.
I don't think that my songs are songs of an adult.
Feathers smoke in my palms of dead songs, forgotten fairy tales, in my mouth the sediment of yesterday's springs of other people's plantings, I am useless
I am a shitty person, I can confidently say that about myself. I have offended many people in my time.
All my quarrels and other things are bad because I approach people with the highest demands - they say, why aren’t they saints? But, frankly speaking, this is terribly offensive - why aren’t they all saints?
My problem is that by indulging my character I missed the opportunity to meet one or two people like me, crazy and ugly. And so we would take and create something so great, strong and living - a song, an idea or just a feeling, an impulse - something that simply would not allow what happened so sadly to all of us to happen.
Not a single Catholic will allow himself to be Christ, but I can openly declare that inwardly I am truly like the ascending Christ in Grunewald’s painting!
I read a lot. But lately I’ve been reading very bad literature. Basically, Sport Express.
The tragedy of my life lies purely in the fact that I am a very ordinary, ordinary person, who all my life wanted to be in the center of the field, to be some kind of midfielder, like Smertin, to do my job and be surrounded by some beautiful people. I prefer to live more comfortably and be a consumer than a producer, a creator. But all my life it turns out that I have to score goals, be at the forefront of the attack, do something, stir things up, invent, create new mythologies, new value systems. After all, no one wants to do anything. And pull, pull it all on yourself.
About people
Everyone is alive, everyone is real - universally, ugly alone. Only the crooked mob is “together.”
The human masses are flowing with urine. They are faceless, They are endless.
You know, I am very pessimistic - somehow I don’t believe (and especially after what has been done) that all of humanity will suddenly become wiser and begin to live differently. The only hope is that at least a few good people, living people, will survive. But I think that they will simply arise as a new stage of evolution, maybe they will not be people at all. Life still goes on - there is no death.
Everyone is some kind of species, or an individual, the main thing is to figure out in time and not be mistaken who you are. And live according to the laws of the type of beast that you are.
You all screwed up your Waterloo.
A person - regardless of what he was initially - ideological or unidealized, reaches the limit of steepness, where at a certain point a moment of choice occurs. Stay here, in this reality, or move on. If a person moves on, then he leaves here, like Ian Curtis or Jim Morrison, say. And not necessarily death, he could simply go crazy or go to the mountains. Either the person remains in reality, exits the elevator as if on a certain floor, and the elevator leaves. And on this floor he begins to become embittered, bitter, cynically and viciously sell himself. This is the most dangerous thing.
Yanka and I constantly had fierce clashes on the topic of love for humanity. She calls to love and pity a person simply for the fact of his existence. For me, a person is initially nothing, he is shit in the hole, a fig in his pocket. However, he can, is capable of growing to the great heavens, to eternity.
By the way, quotes about people
About music
In my understanding, rock is an anti-human, anti-humanistic movement, a certain form of the elimination of man as a psychologically viable system. Man is a creature that is endowed with logical consciousness - and because of this, he cannot live here and now. Therefore, he is immersed in the past or in the future. Only children live here now.
A person who studies fate comprehends life, but not through affirmation, but through destruction, through death. Shamanism is a rhythm on which improvisation is superimposed. And the more shamanism, the more rock. And, conversely, if art and music begin to prevail over shamanism, then rock dies.
Rock and roll is truly folk music. In general, everything that is done honestly, with all one’s strength, desperately and healthily is all people’s work.
Music is an extremely cosmopolitan phenomenon, and it is very difficult to find something clearly national in all possible combinations of seven notes, with the exception, perhaps, of works for the balalaika, zurna or, say, tom-tom.
Every real song is a miracle. Any creativity from the heart is a miracle. And if there is none, then the price of everything is a piece of shit.
I don't understand what's happening in the world right now. Has the situation really reached such an extent that some bands, in my opinion completely mediocre, like Radiohead, have become the main topics of the day? This is rubbish!
There is no punk in Russia. Punk is our paraphernalia. Like at this festival: huge crowds of people with combs, etc., walk everywhere, but there is no substance...
About life
Life is the only miracle that exists on Earth at all, completely inexplicable and incomprehensible, something that does not fit into any religions there - neither Buddhist, nor Jewish, nor Christian.
There is no longer a word for which one could die, go to prison, or go to the stake.
Those who don’t know us are very surprised and even shocked when they see that in life we are cheerful and very sociable people. I generally like living.
The plastic world won, the Model turned out to be stronger. The last boat has cooled down, the last lantern is tired.
Life for me is an incessant search, obtaining new books, music, films, “digesting” them, experiencing them and possible return, or “to the bins.”
Every moment is an overdose for all the remaining times.
You know, it's hard to keep time on the palm of your hand.
There are such things in life that when you comprehend them, when you encounter them, you understand - and after that it is very difficult to continue living, to remain - or become - a person. Apparently, most active people who become “soldiers of fortune,” mercenaries, climbers, drug addicts, and creative people in general belong to a similar state. The fourth and final state is fiery, which is already death. Or holiness.
By the way, quotes about life
About civic position
If earlier I felt that I was not involved in what was happening around me, now I feel involved. Maybe because he's getting old. The feeling is that I finally felt my homeland under my feet. I live here. I'm away. I don't want to go anywhere else.
I never tire of repeating that it is very important that if you were offended, you could knock on the door and shout: “Help, they are killing!” - and the entire entrance jumped out to defend.
Our people love all kinds of shit.
I would shoot on the spot without trial or investigation for displaying ***. All the shame and disgrace that we now observe and have is rooted in only one thing - in the indifference that first one allowed himself, then another, a third, and it grew like meat, like a tumor, like some kind of worm.
Is it clear, for example, to a hungry person that he is hungry, and to a well-fed person that he is full? Or, for example, it is now clear to any, so to speak, financially secure person that he is scared. There has been a split in society into those who are afraid and those who are not afraid. Those people who are not afraid - they do what they want and will do: they will come to power. This is us.
About life ethics
I don’t understand how, without faith and hope, you can do anything at all—even hammering nails.
I'm not broke enough to be myself
Try to do something of your own, unlike anything else. Have no authority other than yourself.
It's not about what you personally feel and think, but about how you act. But you have to act as if there is nothing - neither God there, nor anything else.
The world is with you The world rests on you Hold the whole world on you The world lives only on you So hold it on you.
Do not lose hope and conscience, do not fall into the sin of despondency, do not lay down your arms, do not give up. Stop rotting alive in your cozy traps. Leave your dusty, musty corners - go out into the godless light, take a deep breath. The homeland is waiting for you - hopelessly young, desperate and rebellious. Demand and achieve the impossible! Step on the throat of your melancholy, apathy, laziness. Execute your fear. Act in such a way that Death flees from you in horror. The world is holding on - it's still holding on! - on each of us - alive and invincible.
Strangle the obedient hands of Your disobedient Christ
About "Civil Defense"
“Too strange to live, too rare to die” - this is about us.
Everyone tells me: you have one thing - blackness, obscurantism, depression. This once again shows that no one gives a damn! All my songs (or almost all) are about love, light and joy.
A well-mannered person plays the way he was raised. But we are uneducated people and can play jazz, rock, and punk. We can play both minimal music and noise.
No, I don't feel responsible to the fans. Why should I feel responsible? They can't follow my example. I am a person from a different era, I live by different principles than they do - this is one, and secondly, I am guided by the fact that we need to take an example from ourselves. That is, if you act correctly, then no examples are needed.
As Grebenshchikov sings - where are the young punks who will wipe us off the face of the earth? There are no such punks. Therefore, it will be us - the old punks who will kill and fight to the end.
About the homeland
I defend the Soviet Union to the death. This was my homeland. Now I live God knows where. Some kind of plague has visited us. But it will end soon. The most important weapon is patience. You need to patiently fight, not accept and constantly spoil this plague until it breaks.
Our country is a merciless, ominous testing ground. Since you find yourself here, please accept the rules of the game... If you don’t break, you are a hero for all time, and if it doesn’t work out, then you don’t exist and never existed.”
You can't live here. Here you can only fight, get sick, survive, make your way somewhere with battles and losses. There is no tomorrow here. At any moment you can be beaten, robbed, tools thrown out the train window... They can pass some new law and deprive you of everything. At any moment they can imprison you, and even kill you without trial or investigation.
I would like to live where I am not afraid (I mean the “metamorphoses” of civilization), that is, somewhere in the forests or in the mountains. In California, Australia or Canada. And I would work as something like an eco-terrorist or something close to that. In any case, in the field of ecology, it doesn’t matter by whom, the main thing is that it is useful. I can at least pick up the trash.
About politics
Limonov keeps thinking that there will be a revolution. There will be no revolution.
I realized what had previously been unclear to me: I had always been at war with the perversion of communism - the “pink” Brezhnev regime, of which, in my opinion, Zyuganov is the heir.
I have never been an opponent of communism, just real communism as it should be. Communism is the Kingdom of God on Earth.
For me, a free Motherland is a Motherland free from the policies of foreign capital that dominate now.
I would compare socialism and democracy as the world order of ants and the world order of cockroaches.
By the way, quotes about politics
About love
Love, in my opinion, in general is a very scary thing. In the usual sense. Everything real is generally scary...
And I personally freed my love from further inevitable grief. He lured her with a gingerbread, raped her with a drunken, cruel shoe and hung her on a cloud, like a child with his unloved doll!
In reality, love is when you are not there at all. I call this God. I can simply explain what I experienced. It was as if I didn’t exist at all. I was everything and some kind of stream flowed through me. It was love. I can't say that I loved anyone or anything. It was just love. Like the whole world. I was the whole world.
By the way, quotes about love
About death
When I died, there was no one who could deny it.
I consider myself a living person. For me, death is what is called life, such a concentration of energy that is no longer possible in physical form - and a person throws away the body. Existence begins on another level.
All suicidal themes that can be traced in my texts almost constantly are a consequence of the belief that a person then begins to enjoy life and truly live when he reaches the maximum state at the level of suicide, death, the state of choice.
About religion
It's hard to be God. If you don't know how, don't try it.
Christ was Satan, the Antichrist, because he carried complete freedom of choice, that is, what religion has never given and does not now give.
One wise man came to the conclusion that there is no God. They called him Buddha. Then he died. From his sayings they made a religion, and from him - a God.
There is no holy place without sin.
What I do is a religion of life.
By the way, quotes about religion
About anarchy
Anarchy is a world order that is only for one. Two is too much, too much.
Everyone is united by one desire - to kill and rape all others, others.
About miscellaneous
Quoting is very cool. Take and bring something unexpected and new, beautiful - into what is already... It’s like taking and taking out an old toy from the attic, blowing the dust off it, winking and bringing it to life.
Any reflection causes withdrawal. Detachment is alienation. Alienation is given by digestion: a person understands something, overcomes some level, and it disappears for him.
Queue for the sun on a cold corner.
The winners are wise people, and each of them has a state of accomplishment, and it is sad. A wise person - he pays with everything he has, with himself, so that others can feel good. This is a necessary sacrifice.
As you can see, quite contradictory statements can be found in Yegor Letov’s quotes. This is probably even good: one feels that he did not stop searching for meanings that were important to him, without being afraid to revise one or another of his views.
Quotes about Letov
- K. Kinchev: I have always treated his work with special reverence and respect. I didn’t agree on many things in terms of my worldview; we didn’t agree. But the fact that he was a bright and original artist is clear. I always feel sorry for such people.
- O. Garkusha: He was a wonderful person. An insane number of young and older people grew up listening to his songs - songs of protest, challenge and freedom.
- B. Grebenshchikov: Theoretically, Egor is a very talented person. In theory. In practice, I don’t understand him as a person and his gloom with such a hopeless sense of the world. I judge by what I heard, but I didn’t hear everything. But, again, Letov does what he has to do... For me, he is somewhere in the direction of Nekrasov. The ancient Russian people's will - this is the current. He worries about the Russian people.
- Yu. Shevchuk: I respect Yegor Letov’s work very much, he is a very talented person - that’s for sure. The album “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is on my shelf, and I listen to it often. Of course, now I no longer like some of his poster-like radicalism. I disagree with some things, of course, but the most important thing is that he is very talented. He is a very sincere person - both in the breakthroughs of his consciousness and in his delusions. But he is extremely sincere - and it is visible, it is heard.
- A. Troitsky: I don’t have the slightest sympathy for the personality of Yegor Letov, whom I consider a poser, a misanthrope, a paranoid, and generally an unpleasant type. I'm not even talking about some of his fascist-chauvinist sympathies... As for the work of the Civil Defense group, it is not without interesting moments. In any case, I do not share the enthusiasm that some of my friends from among intellectual music critics have about Yegor Letov and “Civil Defense”. For me, this group might not even exist. She didn't make the slightest contribution to rock as such.
- E. Limonov: Egor was our comrade in arms and one of the founders of the now banned NBP. He was a fiery revolutionary and adhered to absolutely left-wing ideal communist views.
- Y. Naumov: Letov is important. Many thinking people aged 15-22 years old have a need to come into contact with the “wrong side of the world” and feel it, get an idea about it - without such experience a whole dimension is lost in life... Letov, as I see it, is one of the guides to this “wrong side” the world, and a tough, direct and effective guide.
Next, you can move on to other collections of quotes:
- Tsoi quotes
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