“……I’d pass a decree forbidding youngsters to get married. What sort of revolutionaries will they make if they get used to hanging on women’s’ skirts? A women is to us what honey is to a greedy fly. We get stuck at once. I’ve seen it in my own case, and I know only too well. I’d sit down to an evening to read, to develop myself, and my wife would lie down to sleep. I’d read a little and then lie down too, and she’d turn her arse towards me. Then I’d feel insulted by her position and I’d either begin to swear at her or I’d light a cigarette, fuming at her insolence and unable to get off to sleep. So I wouldn’t get enough sleep, and in the morning I’d have a heavy head and would make some political mistake. I’ve had some! And for those that have children they’re completely lost to the party. In a jiffy they’ve learnt how to look after their babies, got used to their milky smell, and they’re done for. They make bad fighters and hopeless workers. In the Tsarist days I used to instruct the young Cossack recruits, and I saw that the single youngsters had cheerful faces and looked intelligent. But when they left their young wives to join the regiment they’d go wooden with yearning and become blockheads. You’d only get confusion from them, and you couldn’t teach them a thing.”
Mikhail Sholokhov “Virgin Soil Upturned” First published in 1932 in the U.S.S.R.
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