“What was conceived as ideal and lofty became coarse and material. So Greece turned into Rome, so the Russian enlightenment turn into the Russian revolution. Take Blok’s “We the children of Russia’s terrible years”, and you’ll see the difference in epochs. When Blok said that, it was to be understood in a metaphorical sense, figuratively. The children were not children, but sons, offspring, the intelligentsia, and the terrors were not terrible, but providential, apocalyptic, and those are two different things. But now all that was metaphorical has become literal, and the children are children, and the terrors and terrifying – there lies the difference.”