"Yurii Andreivich took the newspaper out of the side pocket of his coat and held it out to him [Alexander Alexandrovich].
     "See that? Have a look."
     Still squatting on his heels and poking the fire, he talked to himself.
     "What splendid surgery! You take a knife and with one masterful stroke you cut out all the old stinking ulcers. Quite simply, without any nonsense, you take the old monster of injustic, which has been accustomed for centuries to being bowed and scraped and curtsied to, and you sentence it to death.
     "This fearlessness, this way of seeing the thing through to the end,has a familiar national look about it. It has something of Pushkin's uncompromising clarity and of Tolstoy's unwavering faithfulness to the facts."
     "Pushkin, you said? Wait a second. Let me finish. I can't read and listen to you at the same time," said Alexander Alexandrovich under the mistaken impression that his son-in-law was addressing him.
     "And the real stroke of genius is this. If you charged someone with the task of creating a new world, of starting a new era, he would ask you first to clear the ground. He would wait for the old centuries to finish before starting new ones, he'd want to begin a new paragraph, a new page.
     But here, they don't bother with anything like that. This new thing, this marvel of history, this revelation, is exploded right into the very thick of daily life without the slightest consideration for its course. It doesn't start at the beginning, it starts in the middle, without any schedule, on the first weekday that comes along, while the traffic in the street is at its height. That's real genius. Only real greatness can be so unconcerned with timing and opportunity."

At this moment, the Revolution shines with a brilliant light for Yurii. Its finality, the slashing decisions that are made daily, huge changes in government, all these holds a special allure for him. He is mezmerized by the sheer power of it all. However, he will soon realize that these policy-makers and seizures of power, overturning all of Russian history, will tighten around the neck of the people like a noose. They will choke until they fall limp and no longer resist. Then Yurii will see the true "genius" behind the Revolution, and his opinions will change.