Education Quote by Ryszard Kapuscinski

Kapuscinski drops a quiet provocation here: what looks like a “Russian” literary habit is, in his telling, partly an Asian one. The line reframes Russian canon-building not as a purely European parlor game of salons and critics, but as an embodied discipline - literature as something carried in the body, not just shelved in libraries. “By heart” is doing double duty: memorization as technique, and “heart” as the literal organ of interior life. It hints at a culture where the text isn’t primarily owned (by publishers, universities, or the market) but internalized and recited, social as much as solitary.

The intent is partly corrective and partly political. Kapuscinski, a reporter trained to read empires as borderlands, nudges Western audiences away from the lazy East/West split that treats Russia as an awkward European cousin. He points to Russia’s long exposure to steppe routes, Orthodox chant, oral storytelling, and state institutions that prized recitation - from schoolrooms to prisons. In such conditions, memorization isn’t quaint; it’s a technology of survival. When books are scarce, censored, or dangerous, a poem remembered becomes a portable archive.

The subtext also flatters literature while demystifying it. Russian writing often feels monumental because it was rehearsed into communal memory: Pushkin quoted like scripture, Akhmatova passed mouth-to-mouth, lines functioning as passwords. Kapuscinski suggests the “greatness” of a tradition can come from how it’s practiced, not just what it produces: a culture of people trained to carry language intact through time.