PBC0140: anxiety at future

PBC 140 reveals nationalists’ anxiety at the uncertainty of Russia’s future during World War I and the tumultuous period of the Revolution and Civil War. Responses to Russia’s losses during WWI are noticeably more hopeful than PBC instances from the later revolutionary conflict. Nervous encouragement suggests, “If the world is a joy for you, what is there to grieve about? Why suffer,” one asks in 1915 (W239). By March 1918, the Bolshevik putsch has wiped away the cheery tone: “The mysterious book of Russian /being, where the fates of the world are hidden,/ Has been read to the end and tightly closed,” thus marking the end of Russia itself (W468).