Both fragments Zhorik declaims here come from Alexander Blok’s «The Twelve» («Двенадцать,» 1918), the most famous and most controversial poem to come directly out of the October Revolution: twelve Red Guards march through a blizzard-swept Petrograd, violent, crude, and unstoppable, in a poem that shocked much of Blok’s own Symbolist circle by ending with the unseen figure of Jesus Christ, wreathed in white roses, leading the column onward. The first fragment («So they march with a sovereign stride…») describes that armed, blizzard-proof procession; the second («There stands the bourgeois, like a hungry dog…») is the poem’s mocking image of the old propertied order, reduced to a mangy, tail-tucked cur cowering before the new one. Both passages were fixtures of the Soviet school curriculum, which is exactly how Zhorik, drunk and half-remembering, can still produce them on command — repurposing a hundred-year-old poem about the death of the bourgeoisie into a toast celebrating his own arrival as one.