Looking back at the entire nineteenth century of Russian culture – shattered, finished, unrepentable, which no one must repeat, which no one dare repeat – I wish to hail the century, as one would hail settled weather, and I see in the unity lent it by the measureless cold which welded decades together into one day, one night, one profound winter, within which the terrible State glowed, like a stove, with ice.
Osip Mandelstam The Noise of Time. The Prose of Osip Mandelstam.