From the blood, From the winter And from obtuseness. In the name of the War of 1945, In the name of the Chekist stock. In The name! This was written in 1939, when Kogan was twenty-one years old and the war was two (not six) years away. Kogan’s comrades were going to be worthy of their Chekist predecessors because they came from the same stock and wielded the same wedge against the same “obtuseness” and “cheap comforts.” Kogan’s most famous lines were these: “I’ve never loved the oval, / I’m keen on sketching angles.” His “age” was ultimately the same as Bagritsky’s: “awaiting you out in the yard” and demanding blood sacrifices. I understand it all, it’s no great mystery. Our age is speeding down its iron trail. I understand, and I say: “Long live history!”— And throw myself head-first upon the rail. One of Kogan’s last poems, “The Letter,” was written in December 1940. “We’ve lived to see the day,” he wrote. We, the high-browed boys of a remarkable revolution— Dreamers at ten, Poets and punks at fourteen. Put down on casualty lists at twenty-five. 43 Kogan was killed in 1942, when he was twenty-four years old. His novel in verse, which was conceived—almost sacrilegiously—as his generation’s Eugene Onegin , remained unfinished. His best “Monument” is a poem by his fellow bard Boris Slutsky (who would do so much to reclassify—and immortalize—the graduates of the Communist Lycée as the “war generation”). Let’s do a little boasting Now that the fighting’s done.