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I reflected that if I die some day, look like nobody will write a work dedicated to my memory. So I decided to write one...
06/09/2026

I reflected that if I die some day, look like nobody will write a work dedicated to my memory. So I decided to write one myself. You could write on the front cover: ‘Dedicated to the memory of the composer of this quartet.

Dmitri Shostakovich,
from a letter to Isaak Glikman (July 19, 1960)

The history of literature is an archive of survival strategies. Writers have long known that when the external world threatens to distort their legacy, they must build their own monuments from within.

In July 1960, Dmitri Shostakovich faced this exact necessity. The Soviet state apparatus had finally forced him to join the Communist Party, a bureaucratic capitulation that shattered his spirit. He fled to Dresden, ostensibly to score a film, but instead spent three intense days constructing his String Quartet No. 8.

It was a work built from his own musical monogram, the DSCH motif, woven into the score like a structural signature. Upon his return, he wrote to his confidant Isaak Glikman, declaring the piece his own self-authored epitaph. This act of creative autonomy links the composer directly to the great traditions of literary exile and hidden authorship.

To dictate one’s own memory is a profound historical pivot. Authors from Ovid to Joseph Brodsky understood that the state always seeks to claim the final word, either through total erasure or through the false praise of an official funeral.

When a creator signs an unwanted political document, the real self must retreat into the text. Shostakovich used four instruments to map his internal exile. This method mirrors the precise choices of writers who preserve their identity through strict aesthetic control.

The physical man succumbed to his era, but his deliberate arrangement of sound survived intact. The title page of the eighth quartet stands as a resolved historical fact.

When we examine this musical self-epitaph alongside the grand trajectory of literary history, we encounter a fundamental question about the nature of encoded defiance: does a creator’s retreat into cryptic text and hidden motifs represent a structural capitulation to historical pressure, or is it the ultimate triumph of form, rendering the power of the censor completely obsolete?

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Alexandrovna Manakova
Mosaic of Text NG

Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two ...
05/09/2026

Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.

Paul Auster

The book rests on the table, a sandwich of ink and wood-pulp, content to do nothing. To a pragmatist, it is a coaster for a coffee mug. Yet everything shifts when someone opens the first page.

At that micro-second, the paper dissolves, and a door opens between two separate minds.

Writing is an act of deception where both sides want to be fooled. The author sets a trap, perhaps using a specific shade of green for an umbrella or a rhythmic cadence in a sentence.

The reader gladly steps into the snare, bringing enough imagination to make the trap comfortable. It is a partnership where the director of the play relies entirely on an audience of one sitting in an armchair.

This meeting presents a hilarious paradox. Two people, who would ignore each other on a train, share a connection so private it borders on the scandalous.

A dead gentleman whispers his doubts into the ear of a modern student eating pizza at midnight. The stranger moves into one’s skull, rearranges the furniture of the brain, and stays for the weekend.

For a few hundred pages, their perceptions align to create an illusion.

In this sanctuary of text, there is no small talk about the weather and no polite nodding. It is a stylized intimacy.

Within this palace, two minds meet to invent a universe, proving that truths are discovered when we get lost in someone else’s alphabet.

Dear reader, as you close this page and return to the prose of your daily life, tell me: when you read a masterfully written book, do you truly feel the warm, invisible hand of the author guiding your thoughts, or are you conversing with a beautiful reflection of your own lonely mind?

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Mosaic of Text NG
Alexandrovna Manakova

At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if ...
04/09/2026

At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies.

P. G. Wodehouse, Uneasy Money

How exquisitely precise is this temporal asymmetry. One can only marvel at how early, how effortlessly the feminine spirit constructs its internal fortress. She enters a chaotic world already equipped with an innate emotional literacy. The clumsy, wool-gathering male blunders through his decades, mistaking noise for ambition, utterly bewildered by the quiet currents of reality.

A woman’s life is a masterclass in navigating gravity. Yet she moves through these storms with a crystalline stillness. Her mind is a flawless instrument, tuned to survival, playing its complex melody with effortless certainty.

Meanwhile, a man drags the heavy luggage of his ego through the murky morass of his middle years. He builds empires and wins arguments, yet remains an awkward schoolboy hiding a bruised pride, utterly defenseless against the subtle prisms of actual life. Only when the shadow of the pendulum grows long and blue, somewhere in the pale, trembling twilight of his late seventies, does he, if blessed by some whimsical luck, finally stumble upon that very same stillness. He sits in his wicker chair, wrapped in a wool shawl, finally learning the calm that a woman practiced while building a world around him.

Does this profound asymmetry suggest that a woman’s lifelong poise is a protective armor forged to endure a heavier existential burden, or is a man’s late-winter wisdom simply the moment he finally stops resisting her quiet order?

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Olesia Alexandrovna Manakova
Mosaic of Text NG

But I reckon that this realm of higher needs [the realm of spiritual and existential needs in art], of something more th...
03/09/2026

But I reckon that this realm of higher needs [the realm of spiritual and existential needs in art], of something more than just forgetting about everyday life, of mere recreation, this realm of needs has been clearly neglected by us.

Krzysztof Kieślowski

The sentence remains in the mind like a solitary shard of ice, perfectly clear and remarkably sharp.

How easily we succumb to the dull routine of the present, where a book or a canvas is reduced to a cushion for weary minds, a sweet lozenge to dissolve the grey grit of a Tuesday afternoon. We demand of culture nothing but a tidy room for our brief, supervised vacations from reality.

We crave recreation, that dreadful, synthetic word that smells of damp canvas shoes, public parks, and the predictable click of croquet balls.

But there exists another state of perception altogether, a shimmering, alpine territory where the air is dangerously thin and fiercely bright.

It is the realm of the spinal tingle, that sudden, delicious shiver that registers the presence of a masterwork long before the clumsy intellect can lace its boots.

To neglect this altitude is to sentence oneself to a life lived entirely in the basement of existence, among the turnips and the spiders of the functional.

True art is an alignment of form and shadow, designed to capture the precise, iridescent violet of the puddle a pedestrian steps into, and the ghost of his childhood self looking back from the ripple.

We have systematically starved the exquisite, demanding phantom inside us, the one that does not eat bread, but subsists entirely on the texture of a heavy fabric, the counterpoint of a cello, or the enigmatic stranger’s gaze.

When was the last time a work of art pierced the crust of your daily routine and revealed the dizzying, terrifying, and beautiful abyss beneath it?

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Olesia Alexandrovna Manakova
Mosaic of Text NG

Pablo NerudaPoem 20 (excerpt)Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.Escribir, por ejemplo: "La noche está estr...
02/09/2026

Pablo Neruda
Poem 20
(excerpt)

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.
Escribir, por ejemplo: "La noche está estrellada,
y tiritan, azules, los astros, a lo lejos."
El viento de la noche gira en el cielo y canta.
Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.
Yo la quise, y a veces ella también me quiso.
En las noches como ésta la tuve entre mis brazos.
La besé tantas veces bajo el cielo infinito.
Ella me quiso, a veces yo también la quería.
Cómo no haber amado sus grandes ojos fijos.
Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.
Pensar que no la tengo. Sentir que la he perdido
Oír la noche inmensa, más inmensa sin ella.
Y el verso cae al alma como al pasto el rocío.
Qué importa que mi amor no pudiera guardarla.
La noche está estrellada y ella no está conmigo.
Eso es todo. A lo lejos alguien canta. A lo lejos.
Mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido.
Como para acercarla mi mirada la busca.
Mi corazón la busca, y ella no está conmigo.
La misma noche que hace blanquear los mismos árboles….

***
I can write the saddest verses of all tonight.
Write, for instance: "The night is full of stars,
and the stars, blue, shiver in the distance."
The night wind whirls in the sky and sings.
I can write the saddest verses of all tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
On nights like this, I held her in my arms.
I kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her.
How could I not have loved her large, still eyes?
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
To think I don't have her. To feel that I've lost her.
To hear the immense night, more immense without her.
And the poem falls to the soul as dew to grass.
What does it matter that my love couldn't keep her.
The night is full of stars and she is not with me.
That's all. Far away, someone sings. Far away.
My soul is lost without her…

(Translated by Stephen Tapscott)

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.Thomas MannTo a casual reader, this f...
01/09/2026

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Thomas Mann

To a casual reader, this famous claim sounds noble. We often romanticize the creator as a tragic figure. The non-writer scribbles with easy speed, while the artist supposedly bleeds over every sentence. The ink flows for the amateur, but the professional writer describes an agonized journey through syntax.

Yet this suffering is often a self-inflicted ritual. A writer is someone who merely complicates a natural process. The amateur speaks of a blue sky and enjoys his supper. The writer stands paralyzed before that same horizon, inventing artificial obstacles. He spends hours hunting for an elusive adjective, rejects it for some imaginary rhythm, and demands a rare resurrection instead of a clear likeness.

This celebrated difficulty might be a form of professional vanity. The silent music of language is a convenient myth. Writing is difficult for the author because he chooses to make it difficult, mistaking his slow pace for deep talent. The agonizing struggle on the blank page is frequently just a symptom of hesitation.

When a text requires immense labor from its author, does that struggle truly elevate the final art, or does it simply expose a tedious lack of internal clarity?

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Mosaic of Text NG
Olesia Alexandrovna Manakova

By definition, a human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil… It is as inhuma...
31/08/2026

By definition, a human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil… It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil. The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good in order that moral choice may operate.

Anthony Burgess

True human nature demands a complex equilibrium. It thrives on the constant friction between our dark impulses and our agonizing attempts at grace.

Most moralists spend their fleeting years trying to scrape away every jagged edge of sin. They wish to present a bloodless, sterilized saint to the heavens. They remain entirely blind to the vital texturing that makes an individual identity truly alive.

Forcing absolute goodness upon a man denies the long, difficult labor of the soul. True virtue requires the presence of temptation. It stands as a necessary background against which our willpower can act. Strip away our capacity for malice, remove our flaws, and you transform a living person into a hollow clockwork toy.

The resulting creature might be perfectly harmless, pleasing the superficial observer with its docile movements. Yet, it entirely lacks the dangerous, magnificent authenticity of a free mind. A genuine existence demands both the shadow and the light.

We should proudly claim the messy, unexpurgated volume of our own free will, remaining responsible for our own private heavens and hells.

Dear readers, if a machine could completely erase your capacity for dark thoughts tomorrow, would you accept this flawless innocence, or would you fight to keep your human imperfections?

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Mosaic of Text NG
Olesia Alexandrovna Manakova

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