The children of the revolutionaries were happy dwellers in the land of happy childhood. They respected their seniors, loved their country, and looked forward to improving themselves for the sake of socialism and to building socialism as a means of self-improvement. They were children of the revolution because they were their fathers’ children, because they were born after the revolution, and because they were proud of their paternity and determined to carry on what was at once their father’s ‘profession’, their country’s mission, and History’s secret purpose. Born in the 1920s, they came of age along with socialist realism, and the heart of socialist realism, according to Bukharin’s speech at the First Writers’ Congress in 1934, was romanticism. ‘The soul’ of ‘most of the young people of that time’, wrote one of them many years later, was ‘romantic’ – romantic in the sense of being exalted, vibrant, hopeful, and vulnerable, and Romantic in the sense of seeking transcendence in the here and now. The fathers’ generation had been shaped by the expectation of the apocalypse; the children’s generation was ‘religious’ about the heavenly city they inhabited. The fathers’ friends and lovers were fellow sectarians who shared their faith; the children’s friends and lovers were unique individuals whom they loved for reasons they never tired of discussing but were never supposed to exhaust. The fathers’ ‘classical’ reading was tempered by Symbolism and disciplined by the study of Marx, Lenin, and economics. The children were bored by modernism, entirely innocent of economics, and only indirectly acquainted with Marxism-Leninism through speeches, quotations, and history-book summaries. No one ever read Das Kapital, everyone was in love with Pushkin.