Snow, snow over the whole land across all boundaries. The candle burned on the table, the candle burned. - Boris Pasternak

It was partly the war, the revolution did the rest. The war was an artificial break in life — as if life could be put off for a time — what nonsense! The revolution broke out willy-nilly like a sigh suppressed too long. Everyone was revived, reborn, changed, transformed. You might say that everyone has been through two revolutions — his own, personal revolution as well as the general one. It seems to me that socialism is the sea, and all these separate streams, these private, individual revolutions, are flowing into it — the sea of life, the sea of spontaneity. I said life, but I mean life as you see it in a great picture, transformed by genius, creatively enriched. Only now people have decided to experience it not in books and pictures, but in themselves, not as an abstraction but in practice.

Переделка жизни! Так могут рассуждать люди, хотя, может быть, и видавшие виды, но ни разу не узнавшие жизни, не почувствовавшие её духа, души её. Для них существование - это комок грубого, не облагороженного их прикосновением материала, нуждающегося в их обработке. А материалом, веществом, жизнь никогда не бывает. Она сама, если хотите знать, непрерывано себя обновляющее, вечно себя перерабатывающее начало, она сама вечно себя переделывает и претворяет, она сама куда выше наших с вами тупоумных теорий.

They don’t ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.