There were once many kind people, and even unkind ones pretended to be good because that was the thing to do. Such pretense was the source of the hypocrisy and dishonesty so much exposed in the realist literature at the end of the last century. The unexpected result of this kind of critical writing was that kind people disappeared. Kindness is not, after all, an inborn quality-it has to be cultivated, and this only happens when it is in demand. For our generation, kindness was an old-fashioned, vanished quality, and its exponents were as extinct as the mammoth. Everything we have seen in our times–the dispossession of the kulaks, class warfare, the constant “unmasking” of people, the search for an ulterior motive behind every action–all this has taught us to be anything you like except kind.
–Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope against Hope
