We, the children of Russia's terrible years

“We, the children of Russia's terrible years” is the phrase Gordon uses to distinguish a poetic image of historical inheritance from the brutal reality of children living through the Russian Revolution. His reading turns the line into a measure of historical change: the metaphorical has become literal, and the words “children” and “terrible” now name what they first evoked figuratively.

The Phrase and Its Source

Gordon invokes Blok’s phrase while speaking with Misha Gordon and Innokentii Dudorov. He explains that Blok’s children were not children in the literal sense but the sons, heirs, and intelligentsia of an earlier generation. Likewise, the years called terrible were not terrible in the ordinary sense; Gordon interprets them as apocalyptic, as events sent from above. The line thus originally described a generation’s inheritance through metaphor rather than the direct suffering of actual children.

From Metaphor to Literal Experience

Gordon contrasts that figurative meaning with the Russian Revolution. In the new historical reality, he says, children are children and the terrors are terrible. The repetition of the phrase’s two central terms sharpens the difference: the words have not changed, but the conditions they describe have. The line no longer stands at a safe poetic distance from history; its image has become a literal condition of life.

Historical Judgment and Narrative Echo

The phrase appears within Gordon’s broader argument 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 invokes Blok to articulate the human consequence of that historical transformation. Several years later, Gordon and Dudorov sit at an open window above Moscow, reading an album of Yurii’s writings that Evgraf has assembled. Their return to the writings makes the phrase part of an act of remembrance: the children of the terrible years are not only a poetic generation but people whose childhood fell within a period of actual terror.