The world in minature

Who has not, at least once in their life, been to a wedding ball? Everyone can think back to his own memories and will certainly smile as he recalls all those people dressed in their Sunday best, with faces to match their conventional dress. If ever a social event proves the influence of environment, surely a wedding party does. Indeed, those who are dressed up for the day have such an effect on the others that people who are quite used to formal dress look as if they belong to a group for whom the wedding is a landmark in their lives. Then remember those solemn old men who are so indifferent to everything that they have not changed their everyday black suits; and the old married men whose faces show the sad experience of life, which the young are just beginning. And there are the pleasurable excitements of the occasion, like the bubbles of carbon dioxide in the champagne, and the envious girls, and the women taken up with the success of their wedding outfits, and the poor relations whose meagre finery is in contrast to the people in full dress rig, and the gluttons who think only of the supper, and the card-players only of playing cards. All types are there, rich and poor, the envious and the envied, the realists and the idealists, all gathered together like the flowers in a bouquet around one rare flower, the bride. A wedding ball is the world in miniature.  

Revolutionary Dreams, Richard Stites

The sheer existence of the dreams, plans, projects and experiments enumerated above, flourishing in the years of revolution, Civil War and N.E.P - before and after the death of Lenin - sets this period off in a stunning way from the years of Stalinism. The utopias were like so many experimental teams in Lenin's gigantic laboratory of revolution, using materials and expending time and exuberant energy on projects that were marginal to the Party leader's own 'research design' for building socialism by means of tutelary state power and organization - from the top down. Lenin frowned on some of the experiments, barked at the experimenters, and sometimes even deprived them of their equipment and funds. But, unlike his successor Stalin, he did not destroy this vast laboratory, did not close it all down, did not arrest and exterminate its principle investigators.

Warsaw 2016, Landscapes of Communism, Owen Hatherley

The extreme spatial hierarchies of the jingoistic memorials, boulevards, palaces and secret policemen's castles of high Stalinism or of Ceausescu were grotesque, for all their occasionally compelling architectural qualities, and their claim to being in the lineage of any idea of 'socialism' is astonishingly tenuous. Yet the immense housing estates, however much they were a negation of the Marxist idea of the 'self-activity of the working class', were nothing if not egalitarian, if not a total attack on the notion of urban hierarchy, with all the architectural compositions based on the refusal to let any one object take primacy at any given time, and surrounded with a sea of completely public, free space.

unintelligable as any dream

Charles Dickens Dombey and Son (1848),

Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood. Here, a chaos of carts, overthrown and jumbled together, lay topsy-turvy at the bottom of a steep unnatural hill; there, confused treasures of iron soaked and rusted in something that had accidentally become a pond.

 

Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere; thoroughfares that were wholly impassable; Babel towers of chimneys, wanting half their height; temporary wooden houses and enclosures, in the most unlikely situations; carcases of ragged tenements, and fragments of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding, and wildernesses of bricks, and giant forms of cranes, and tripods straddling above nothing. There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the air, mouldering in the water, and unintelligible as any dream.