Pevsner Quotes

About immigrants from Russia: Soviet consciousness overlapped with the new American spirits has formed a specific and divisive culture. This culture is full of controversies and combines free will and envy, political conservatism and the desire for equality, ambitiousness in career and cutting corners, and earthliness and spirituality.

About Jewish loyalty: What we have seen from history is practical Jewish approach to the country of residence: loyalty in exchange of the equal opportunity and no persecution. Fair enough?

About the last Exodus: Virtually every one of us Russian Jews had to choose between “to leave or not to leave” as it has been many times during the last two thousand years of Jewish history.

About Russia: Ironically, in the country where common people’s dislike and fear of their state takes place, we can hear much more talks about how people should love their state. The tradition comes from the history of massive executions in the name of state and ideology imposed by brutal leaders from Ivan the Terrible to Stalin.

About Jews: The phenomenon of why Jews have kept the unanimity of a distinctive culture is because combination of the persecution and specific Jewish state of mind gave a new quality of the advanced survival. What I mean by that is not only a survival but against all the odds, making progress in any area of activities: arts, business, science, politics, etc.

As students in the 1950s we were conditioned into despising the excesses of baroque/rococo architecture; that is, until we were reprogrammed by Nikolaus Pevsner in his Slade lectures at Cambridge.

An Outline of European Architecture by Nikolaus Pevsner.