I'm thinking about the future. Our children will imagine us great heroes, and will create legends about us. And even our ordinary daily existence and our hunger, the forced idleness in production, even the watch you and I are keeping tonight - all will be raised to a higher power, as they say in mathematics. It will all be reflected in their imagination as an epoch of heroic exploits and titanic achievements. And we - you and I - little grains of dust in an immense mass, we shall seem to them as giants. The past is always generalised and exaggerated. They won't remember our mistakes, cruelties, failures, weaknesses, our simple human sufferings and our damnable problems. They will say: "These were the people who were destined to conquer the whole world." And they will visit our graves as if we were inextinguishable beacons.

Fyodor Vasilievich Gladkov, Cement