Blood Red, Snow White

There never was a story that was happy through and through.

He had learned something already in the course of his journey. If you carried a closed wooden box, people want to know what is in it.

Stories twist and turn and grow and meet and give birth to other stories. Here and there, one story touches another, and a familiar character, sometimes the hero, walks over the bridge from one story into another.

She risked her life to put your mind at rest,' Evgenia said. 'How great is love!

You have life written all over you. Some people bear tragedy on their faces; loss, death, whatever it might be. But you have life.

Slowly he had learned that there is a world beneath the visible one, and that people, some people at least, have a different life, that they carry inside them.

Love, he decided, is not about how much someone else cares for you, it's about how much you care for someone else.

The time for princes and tsars and holy madmen was gone. In its place came a world of war and revolution, of tanks and telephones, murder and assassination.

Why were there some people who seemed so sure of themselves that it made him feel small and ignorant by comparison, as if they had a script to life with all the answers on it? He felt he didn't even know the questions.

And that was how the young writer found love, just when he had stopped looking for it.

The bear, which by now was as large as the cathedral on Catherine’s canal, rose on its hind legs like a dancing bear in a street market. For a moment the sun was blotted out by its size, and then it fell. As it fell, it came apart. It disintegrated. It fell like brown snow, but each flake was a person. The bear had been one hundred thousand people, and now the people came to earth, tumbling into the snowy streets of the city and picking themselves up, laughing at it all. Far from being hurt, they realised that they felt strong. But, like the bear, they felt hungry. They ran through the streets, swarming like bees, joining others who had emerged when the sun had. It was chaos.

The time for princes and tsars and grand duchesses and especially holy madmen was gone. In its place came a world of war and revolution, of tanks and telephones, of murder and assassination. The bear had already become what it had been waiting to be, and the men who set it on its journey changed too. Lev became Trotsky, Vladimir took the name Lenin, and they stepped into a bright and furious modern world; blood red, and snow white.