I bought the book “Zolotyje Rossypi” (“The Gold Mine”) fifty-one years ago – on August 31, 1964 to be exact, which date I noted on the front fly leaf of the book. It’s a collection of aphorisms and maxims told in different times by distinguished personalities, or at least by those whom the compiler believed to be distinguished. The book has the subtitle “Everything in a human being should be beautiful”, which was borrowed from Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.” The book is permeated by social optimism reflecting the propagandistic belief in the “bright future”, so characteristic of the Soviet Union in the 1960s. Especially thundering are the quotations from the works and speeches by communist ideologues or leaders – Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and all the way down to Nikita Khrushchev (he was toppled two months later, in October, 1964). It must be admitted that most aphorisms were worth to be armed with – like Plutarch’s “Courage is the beginning of victory”, or Shota Rustaveli’s “Consider as lost what you have hidden, consider as gained what you have given.” As a high school student, I used the book rather often to pick up epigraphs for essays in literature: it was estimated to be a super-duper beginning if you started your essay with a clever quote from a philosopher, a song-writer, or a “revolutionary” phrase belonging to Felix Dzerzhinskiy, a long-deceased KGB head.
I dug up “Zolotyje Rossypi” today from among my other books. I only leafed through that find thinking how naïve we were as children, but the book “The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde” (a much later present from my sister), which was in the same pile, drew my attention, and I got glued to it for the rest of the day. I couldn’t but marvel at Oscar Wilde’s observation of human nature and at his epigrammatic pronouncements. Yes, as a student I studied his works, we even staged a scene from “The Importance of Being Earnest.” But when I was reading the “Wilde-isms” now, the impression was that I had never really known Oscar Wilde. The incisive and penetrating knowledge of humankind is seen in the quips, like “To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance”, or “The truth about the life of a man is not what he does, but the legend which he creates around himself.”
It may take decades to grow from the superfluous optimism of youth to Oscar Wilde’s healthy pessimism. However, this generalization may be too hasty: “Only the shallow know themselves” (my last quote from Oscar Wilde for today :-))
