“To shine always, to shine everywhere”

“To shine always, to shine everywhere” is a recurring affirmation that binds public poetry, winter celebration, and private grief. First voiced in a congress performance associated with Mayakovsky, it later becomes part of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov’s account of Christmas and resurfaces in Mishka’s letter as he remembers Katerina Litvinova. The phrase shifts from a declaration of radiant defiance into a measure of what love leaves behind.

A public motto

At the first-day dinner of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers congress, served at eleven o’clock to a table set for sixty, Mayakovsky rose onto his chair and recited his poem. The lack of a lectern made the performance itself part of its force: he banged on the table, then addressed the gathering from above it. Mishka, caught up in the moment, tried to stand on the banquette, nearly tipping over his beer. He settled for a seated oration, finger raised, and recited the poem’s affirmation of shining everywhere and through the last days.

The contrast between the two performances gives the motto its first comic and political texture. Mayakovsky’s poem provoked unrestrained applause and smashed glasses; Mishka’s attempt to imitate the poet was both earnest and constrained by the banquette that kept him in his seat. The congress’s work included declarations of intent, proclamations of allegiance, and statements of solidarity with an expansive list of workers. Against that formal language, the poem’s insistence on shining offered a vivid, personal-sounding declaration. Mishka’s next aside, mocking the expectation that Zelinsky must also speak, punctures the congress’s solemnity without diminishing the charge of the verse.

Christmas and the life of a remembered image

The Count later gives the affirmation a different setting while speaking with a British visitor about Christmas and Tchaikovsky’s ballet. He gestures over the bar to suggest the Christmas tree growing, while the visitor whistles the march from the ballet’s opening. The Count argues that winter cheer burns brightest in Russia: its dark, cold, snowbound climate makes Christmas spirit all the more vivid, and Tchaikovsky has captured its sound better than anyone.

His claim extends beyond the immediate holiday. He imagines children across twentieth-century Europe growing up with the ballet’s melodies and picturing Christmas as the ballet depicts it. In old age, he says, the tree will rise again from the floor of memory, restoring the wonder of childhood. The shining motto thus belongs not only to a moment of performance but also to an image carried forward: an experience that can be recalled and made present again. The Count’s vision of the remembered tree prepares for the phrase’s more painful return in Mishka’s letter, where memory also restores an image, but cannot restore the life once shared.

Mishka’s letter and the persistence of loss

In a letter dated June 14, 1930, Mishka describes setting out at four in the morning, unable to sleep, and walking Nevsky Prospekt through the stillness of the white nights. He crosses the Moika and Fontanka Canals and reaches Tikhvin Cemetery, where Dostoevsky and Tchaikovsky lie close together. The route becomes, in his account, a passage through Russian literature: Pushkin’s house, the rooms where Gogol began Dead Souls, the National Library where Tolstoy searched the archives, and the cemetery itself. As the sun rises over the walls, Mishka recalls the affirmation of shining everywhere and through the last days.

The Count is moved less by the literary landmarks or by nostalgia for the old city than by the route’s private history. Four years earlier, Mishka had moved to Kyiv with Katerina Litvinova; after she left him for another man, he returned to Saint Petersburg and retreated behind his books. On this spring morning, he has unknowingly followed the same path he once walked with Katerina on the day she first took his hand. The sunrise and the recalled words make that lost beginning feel briefly present, even as the journey exposes how irretrievable it is.

The novel does not treat Mishka’s enduring grief as something he will simply outgrow. The Count understands that Mishka will pine for Katerina for the rest of his life, and that Nevsky Prospekt will always carry the weight of their separation. In this final return, shining is no longer only the exuberance of a poem or the warmth of a remembered Christmas. It is an affirmation held beside absence. The heartbreak that the phrase cannot erase becomes, instead, proof that love was not merely ephemeral.