“I never could understand people like Tolstoy, in love with the family archives with their epic poems made of domestic memories. I repeat: my memory is not of love, but of hostility, and it labors not at reproducing, but at distancing the past. For an intellectual of mediocre background, memory is useless, it would suffice for him to talk about the books he had read, and his biography would be complete, where for fortunate generations, the epic poem was spoken in hexameters and in chronicles, for me, there stands a gaping sign, and between me and the century there lies an abyss, a ditch filled with time that murmurs :What did my family wish to say? I do not know. It had been stuttering since birth, and yet it had something to say. This congenital stuttering weighs heavily on me and on many of my contemporaries. We were not taught to speak but to stammer – and only by listening to the swelling noise of the century and being bleached by the foam on the crest of its wave did we acquire a language.” Ossip Mandelstam