I accept the world – the whole world with its stupidity, obliqueness, dead and dry colours – only in order to fool this bony witch and make her young again. In the embraces of the Fool and the Buffoon the old world brightens up, becomes young, and its eyes become translucent, depthless.
Alexander Blok, in a letter from 1906
The liveliest and most perceptive children of our time are afflicted by a disease unknown to doctors of the body and of the mind. This disease has an affinity with mental diseases and can be called 'irony'. Its symptoms are fits of exhausting laughter which begin with a devilishly mocking, provocative smile and ends with violence and blasphemy.
I know people that are ready to choke with laughter at the very same time that their mother is dying, they themselves are starving to death and their beloved is betraying them. A man guffaws, and you don't know whether as soon as he leaves you he is going to drink some poison and you wonder if you will ever see him again. And to me this very laughter tells about this person, that he despises everything and abandons everything – as if it were nothing at all.
Don't listen to our laughter; listen to the pain in it. Don't believe any of us, but those that are behind us.
Blok, in an article from 1908