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# I do not call for the replacement of the state by a library – though the thought has visited me more than once — but I have no doubt that, were we to choose our rulers on the basis of their reading experience rather than their political programmes, there
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/ia-ne-prizyvaiu-k-zamene-gosudarstva-bibliotekoi-khotia-mysl-eta-neodnokratno-menia-poseshchala-no-ia-ne-somnevaius-chto-vybirai-my-nashikh-vlastitelei-na-osnovanii-ikh-chitatelskogo-op/
- Published: 2024-06-16T18:02:07.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:33:29.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Books, Society, People

I do not call for the replacement of the state by a library – though the thought has visited me more than once — but I have no doubt that, were we to choose our rulers on the basis of their reading experience rather than their political programmes, there would be less grief on earth. It seems to me that a potential ruler of our destinies should be asked, first of all, not how he imagines the course of foreign policy, but how he feels about Stendhal, Dickens, Dostoevsky.

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I will say only that – not from experience, alas, but merely in theory – I believe that for a man who has read his Dickens, to shoot at his fellow man in the name of any idea whatever is harder than for a man who has not read Dickens. And I speak precisely of reading Dickens, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Balzac, Melville and so on, that is, of literature, not of literacy, not of education. A literate, educated man is perfectly capable, having read this or that political treatise, of killing his fellow man, and even of feeling, in doing so, the rapture of conviction. Lenin was literate, Stalin was literate, Hitler too; Mao Zedong even wrote verse; the list of their victims, nevertheless, far exceeds the list of what they had read.

**Nobel lecture by Joseph Brodsky. 10 December 1987**