Quotes from book
The Faculty of Useless Knowledge

Name: The Faculty of Useless Knowledge
Author: Yury Dombrovsky

Yury Dombrovsky Original title Факультет ненужных вещей (Russian, 1978)

The Faculty of Useless Knowledge is a novel by Soviet writer Yury Dombrovsky about the fate of the Russian intellectual in the era of Stalin's repressions, written in 1964-1975. It completes a kind of dialogue begun by the novel "The Guardian of Antiquities" . The novel was dedicated to Dombrovsky's "New World" editor Anna Samoilovna Berser and published in the West ; according to the popular version, this publication was the cause of Dombrovsky's death . In the USSR, the first publication took place in 1988 in the "New World" .

“It was indeed a dead grove, made up of the corpses of trees. Even the wood of these corpses was non-living, a deathly grey, silver-green, with peeling bark; and the bark had also flaked, shrivelling and simply sloughing off like dead skin. And arching along all the dead twigs, crawled a supple, clutching, lashing, bold convolvulus-serpent. It was her leaves which glowed a cheerful green on the dead branches, on all their agonizing bifurcations; it was her flowers which hung on the branches from clusters of tiny suckers and tentacles, astonishingly tender and serene. They were so alien to that austere and honest deathly sterility that they seemed almost dazzling. It was like an explosion of something splendid, like the sombre and magical secret of that dead river and its dry valley. There was something about that copse reminiscent of the hut on chickens' legs, or Koschei's hoard, or the field sown with dead men's bones.”

Yury Dombrovsky book The Faculty of Useless Knowledge

tr. Alan Myers, The Harvill Press, 1996, Part 1, Chapter 2, pp. 100-101
cited and discussed in Peter Doyle, Iurii Dombrovskii: Freedom Under Totalitarianism, Routledge, 2000, p. 145 https://books.google.com/books?id=MoLCsjaQT08C&lpg=PA145&ots=ekC9_khOAS&dq=%22It%20really%20was%20a%20dead%20grove%22&pg=PA145#v=onepage&q=%22It%20really%20was%20a%20dead%20grove%22&f=false
The Faculty of Useless Knowledge (1975)