Two coats are enough to last a lifetime, but you can’t live without Pushkin or the complete works of Gorky

My mother wasn’t alone, all of her friends were like this, too—the first generation of Soviet intelligentsia who had grown up on Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, Nekrasov...on Marxism...Could you imagine my mother sitting down and embroidering something or going out of her way to decorate our house with porcelain vases or little elephant figurines...Never! That would be a pointless waste of time. Petit bourgeois nonsense! The most important thing is spiritual labor...Books...You can wear the same suit for twenty years, two coats are enough to last a lifetime, but you can’t live without Pushkin or the complete works of Gorky.

S. Alexievich, tr. B. Shayevich, Second-hand time (2013), 224