"The Lenin Library in Moscow doesn't close until ten in the evening. For me this is a sign of civilisation. I was working on the ground floor, between two bookcases full of old books with green and red bindings, next to a window which looked out on to a park..."
Oranges for the Son of Alexander Levy, Nella Bielski (trans. John Berger & Lisa Appignanesi)
[I would have liked to find a more appropriate picture to illustrate the quote, but it was the best I could do from a few minutes googling. Besides, I rather like it for some reason.
[The novel takes the form of a monologue of a middle aged woman, while she sits in a Moscow hospital next to her mother, who is dying of cancer. Written in the late 70s - like her author she's part of a generation that was evacuated to the Urals during the Second World war, and has since survived the death of Stalin, Khrushchev, and has now reached the point where the Soviet system was starting it's slow decline into obsolescence. Her account of her life circles around the figures of her absent husband, a Frenchman who has recently left her, her young daughter, her parents, the life she and her friends have managed to live in spite of all the political repression they faced under Communism. It's concerned principally with all that's left over, with all that can't be accounted for by any ideology.]
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