History and Agency Theme Analysis

The boys were playing at the most dreadful and adult of games, at war, and moreover of a sort that you were hanged or exiled for taking part in. Yet the ends of their bashlyks were tied at the back with such knots that it gave them away as children and showed that they still had papas and mamas. Lara looked at them as a big girl looks at little boys. There was a bloom of innocence on their dangerous amusements. They imparted the same stamp to everything else. To the frosty evening, overgrown with such shaggy hoarfrost that its thickness made it look not white but black. To the blue courtyard. To the house opposite, where the boys were hiding. And, above all, to the pistol shots that cracked from it all the time. “The boys are shooting,” thought Lara. She thought it not of Nika and Patulya, but of the whole shooting city. “Good, honest boys,” she thought. “They're good, that’s why they’re shooting.”

Suddenly, for the first time in all those days, Yuri Andreevich understood with full clarity where he was, what was happening to him, and what would meet him in a little more than an hour or two.

Three years of changes, uncertainty, marches, war, revolution, shocks, shootings, scenes of destruction, scenes of death, blown-up bridges, ruins, fires—all that suddenly turned into a vast, empty place, devoid of content. The first true event after the long interruption was this giddy train ride towards his home, which was intact and still existed in the world, and where every little stone was dear to him. This was what life was, this was what experience was, this was what the seekers of adventure were after, this was what art had in view—coming to your dear ones, returning to yourself, the renewing of existence.

His friends had become strangely dull and colorless. None of them had held on to his own world, his own opinion. They were much brighter in his memories. Apparently he had overestimated them earlier.

As long as the order of things had allowed the well-to-do to be whimsical and eccentric at the expense of the deprived, how easy it had been to mistake for a real face and originality that whimsicality and right to idleness which the minority enjoyed while the majority suffered.

But as soon as the lower strata arose and the privileges of the upper strata were abolished, how quickly everyone faded, how unregretfully they parted with independent thinking, which none of them, evidently, had ever had!

Administrative re-elections were held everywhere: in house committees, in organizations, at work, in public service institutions. Their makeup was changing. Commissars with unlimited power were appointed everywhere, people of iron will, in black leather jackets, armed with means of intimidation and revolvers, who rarely shaved and still more rarely slept.

They were well acquainted with the petty bourgeois breed, the average holder of small government bonds, the groveling conformist, and never spared him, talking to him with a Mephistophelean smirk, as with a pilferer caught in the act.

These people controlled everything as the program dictated, and enterprise after enterprise, association after association, became Bolshevik.

From an early age Strelnikov had striven for the highest and the brightest. He considered life an enormous arena in which people, honorably observing the rules, compete in the attainment of perfection.

When it turned out that this was not so, it never entered his head that he was wrong in simplifying the world order. Having driven the offense inside for a long time, he began to cherish the thought of one day becoming an arbiter between life and the dark principles that distort it, of stepping forth to its defense and avenging it.

Disappointment embittered him. The revolution armed him.

And everything used to give joy by its richness and shapeliness—church services, dances, people, manners—even though the family was from simple folk, tradesmen, from peasants and workers. And Russia, too, was a young girl, and she had real suitors, real protectors, not like nowadays. Now everything’s lost its sheen, there’s nothing but the civilian trash of lawyers and Yids, chewing words tirelessly, day and night, choking on words. Vlasushka and his retinue hope to lure the old golden times back with champagne and good wishes. Is that any way to win back a lost love? You’ve got to overturn stones for that, move mountains, dig up the earth!

“[…] I grant that you’re all bright lights and liberators of Russia, that without you she would perish, drowned in poverty and ignorance, and nevertheless I can’t be bothered with you, and I spit on you, I don’t like you, and you can all go to the devil.

“The rulers of your minds indulge in proverbs, but they’ve forgotten the main one, that love cannot be forced, and they have a deeply rooted habit of liberating people and making them happy, especially those who haven’t asked for it. You probably fancy that there’s no better place in the world for me than your camp and your company. I probably should even bless you and thank you for my captivity, for your having liberated me from my family, my son, my home, my work, from everything that’s dear to me and that I live by.”

This time justified the saying: Man is a wolf to man. A wayfarer turned aside at the sight of another wayfarer; a man would kill the man he met, so as not to be killed himself. There were isolated cases of cannibalism. The human laws of civilization ended. Those of beasts were in force. Man dreamed the prehistoric dreams of the caveman.

After two or three easily poured-out stanzas and several similes that he was struck by himself, the work took possession of him, and he felt the approach of what is known as inspiration. The correlation of forces that control creative work is, as it were, stood on its head. The primacy no longer belongs to man and the state of his soul, for which he seeks expression, but to the language in which he wants to express it. Language, the homeland and receptacle of beauty and meaning, itself begins to think and speak for man and turns wholly into music, not in terms of external, audible sounds, but in terms of the swiftness and power of its inner flow. Then, like the rolling mass of a river’s current, which by its very movement polishes the stones of the bottom and turns the wheels of mills, flowing speech itself, by the force of its own laws, on its way, in passing, creates meter and rhyme and thousands of other forms and constructions, still more important, but as yet unrecognized, unconsidered, unnamed.

With his lament for Lara, he also lamented that far-off summer in Meliuzeevo, when the revolution was a god come down from heaven to earth, the god of that time, that summer, and each one went mad in his own way, and the life of each existed by itself and not as an explanatory illustration confirming the rightness of superior politics.

This was the sickness of the age, the revolutionary madness of the epoch. In thought everyone was different from words and outward show. No one had a clear conscience. Each with good reason could feel himself guilty, a secret criminal, and unexposed deceiver. On the slightest pretext, a rage of self-castigating imagination would play itself out to the uttermost limits. People fantasized, denounced themselves, not only under the effect of fear, but also drawn on by a destructively morbid inclination, of their own free will, in a state of metaphysical trance and passion for self-condemnation that, once set loose, could not be stopped.

The kingdom of plants so easily offers itself as the nearest neighbor to the kingdom of death. Here, in the earth’s greenery, among the trees of the cemetery, amidst the sprouting flowers rising up from the beds, are perhaps concentrated the mysteries of transformation and the riddles of life that we puzzle over. Mary did not at first recognize Jesus coming from the tomb and took for the gardener walking in the cemetery.

One day Larissa Fyodorovna left the house and did not come back again. Evidently she was arrested on the street in those days and died or vanished no one knew where, forgotten under some nameless number on subsequently lost lists, in one of the countless general or women’s concentration camps in the north.

To the aging friends at the window it seemed that this freedom of the soul had come, that precisely on that evening the future had settled down tangibly in the streets below, that they themselves had entered into that future and henceforth found themselves in it. A happy, tender, sense of peace about this holy city and about the whole earth, about the participants in this story who had lived till that evening and about their children, filled them and enveloped them in an inaudible music of happiness, which spread far around. And it was as if the book in their hands knew it all and lent their feelings support and confirmation.