/lit/ - Literature

>>12645961
It's pretty short, like 200 pages in Russian, which makes since since it was largely written as bolsheviks advanced on his estate. The first part is his collected poetry which was written throughout the early 20th centuiry and into the early days of ww1. the rest is his philosophy about why war occurs and how nationalism and a love of god and family are needed to prevent mass violence.

he died like a real badass - the bolshies advanced on his house and he sat up behind a tree with like six guns, several rifles and pistols, and fired until he was out of ammunition then fought them with his cavalry sword.

>Vengeance, naked vengeance, is the greatest engine of man's progress. It is only when a man has been willfully slighted, totally debased and stripped of his illusions of 'goodwill between men', that he can begin to create the extraordinary. From the young writer called a poet-aster who rises to great heights in his maturity to the beaten servant boy that comes to be the master of a vast merchant empire, nothing stokes a man's fire hotter than to see others proven wrong and to acquire the power to lay them low.
>Further, vengeance is the only universal urge. Every nation's myths share it, and there is nothing else that can turn a meek clerk into a magnate and a wan governess into a poisoner with equal swiftness. Only certain souls can kill for their nation or their god, more can kill for their family, more still if driven by circumstance, but every living person can kill, kill without remorse, kill again and again in the name of vengeance. It is the spirit that primes every duelist's pistol and draws the lines on every revanchist's map. It is the soul of nationalism, Marxism, and anarchism alike.
>We stand on the precipice of a time in which every motivation that can be called 'good' will fall away. All those couched in love. Love of one's country, one's god, one's family, even oneself will die off. Avarice may replace them for a time but it will breed vengeance and vengeance, vengeance alone, will endure forever as new and ancient slights render every man and every people nothing more than agents of vengeance and death shall reign.

-V. Ivanonovich Sokolov, Tsarist Russian officer, philosopher of warfare, and occasional poet writing in 1917, mere days before he was killed defending his family home from Bolsheviks.