The metaphorical has become literal

Misha Gordon’s formulation “the metaphorical has become literal” marks a change in how Russia’s history can be described: what an earlier poet meant figuratively has become the actual condition of children living through the Russian Revolution. The phrase turns a comparison between historical periods into a measure of the Revolution’s human consequences.

The Conversation

Five or ten years after the central events, Gordon and Innokentii Dudorov sit together at an open window above Moscow on a quiet summer evening. They are reading an album of Yurii Andreievich Zhivago’s writings, assembled by Evgraf Andreievich Zhivago and read by the two friends more than once. When they reach the middle of the book, darkness has fallen, and they switch on the light. In this reflective setting, Gordon considers the distance between lofty ideals and what history makes of them.

From Figure to Fact

Gordon argues that a lofty ideal can degenerate into crude materialism. He compares Greece giving way to Rome with the Russian Enlightenment becoming the Russian Revolution, then stresses that the two historical periods are not equivalent in every respect. His reading of Alexander Blok’s line, “We, the children of Russia's terrible years,” supplies the distinction: Blok’s children were figurative heirs, the sons and intelligentsia who inherited an era, while the terrors were apocalyptic in a metaphorical sense.

Gordon’s conclusion reverses that figurative distance. In the Revolution’s aftermath, children are children, and the terrors are terrible: the language no longer stands safely for heirs and historical upheaval but points to actual young lives and actual suffering. The phrase therefore does not merely say that a metaphor has come true; it identifies the altered human scale against which the older language must now be heard.

Historical and Narrative Significance

The expression brings the conversation’s broad historical comparison down to the most concrete distinction Gordon can make: metaphorical children versus real children. It also links the novel’s late recollection of revolutionary catastrophe to its surviving records. Gordon and Dudorov are reading Zhivago’s writings years later, but the shift from figure to fact insists that the past remains legible through its consequences for people who lived through it—and for the children who inherited it.