‘Behold’, cried Thomas Carlyle, in an ecstatic aside while describing the initial stages of the French Revolution, ‘the World-Phoenix, in fire-consummation and fire-creation … skyward lashes the funeral flame, enveloping all things: it is the Death–Birth of a World!’ It is at such points that history and myth coalesce, but the mythologising process is one that turns history into literature. In the Russian literary response to revolution an imagery of death and birth is paramount and the death–birth concept becomes itself a transfiguring ideal.

Revolution as a fanaticism that would, like some fiery apocalypse, consume the existing world and create a new one, a World-Phoenix, is the legacy that the events of 1789 bequeathed to nineteenth-century history and culture. Many great nineteenth-century minds were influenced by such a vision of revolution giving birth to a new world and a new life and among those most deeply affected by it were the leading minds of the Russian intelligentsia. For if the world needed changing, to put it at its simplest, there seemed no likelihood that God would suddenly alter His creation, any more than would the Tsar. The only phenomenon in recent history that could so alter the known world as to transform it utterly in the name of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity was the French Revolution.