“The war period strengthened my belief that humanity is mentally sick, crazy, and fundamentally evil. This belief led me to despair and to attempts to relinquish my faith in humanity, in the triumph of good over evil.”
“The period between 1949 and 1953 was a time of great contradictions for me. The desire for moral and psychological reconstruction after the catastrophe of war, the search for a vehicle that would socially unite people and provide a chance for joint action in this reconstruction – and at the same time a feeling of loneliness and helplessness.”
“My father’s sentence and imprisonment opened up the only opportunity for me to find myself in a psychological position of strength against him. I am free, I have the opportunity to act. The trial and the (death) sentence were a theatrical representation of revolutionary terror.”
“Contradictions were revealed. Communism versus the Russian Empire. Classlessness versus the incitement of class conflict. The scientific rationality of Marxism versus wild hatred and terror. Acting in the interests of disadvantaged classes while simultaneously building an exclusive bureaucratic class. Protection of cultural goods versus simultaneous destruction of the class that created and maintained them. Lack of trust in the creators of art and science.”
“It was a great psychological triumph for me. For the first time in my life, I felt stronger than my father, I stopped being afraid of him, and in my inner conviction, my entire brief involvement in propaganda art had not stimulated the working class or the peasantry but instead had freed my father from prison and me from the feeling of fear of him.”
