Curzio Malaparte: quotation

“Behind the Doric columns of the ‘Pyatlyetki,’ the Five Year Plans, behind the rows of figures of the ‘Gosplan,’ there stretches not Asia, but another Europe: ‘the’ other Europe (in the sense in which America too is another Europe). The steel cupola of Marxism + Leninism + Stalinism (the gigantic dynamo of the U.S.S.R. according to Lenin’s formula: Soviet + electrification = Bolshevism) is not the mausoleum of Genghis Khan but - in the very sense that bourgeois folk find so distasteful - the ‘other’ Parthenon of Europe. ‘The Volga,’ says Pilnyak, ‘flows into the Caspian Sea.’ Yes, but it does not rise in Asia: it rises in Europe. It is a European river. The Thames, the Seine, the Potomac are its tributaries.”

Curzio Malaparte, THE VOLGA RISES IN EUROPE