Sure, she’s “attractively dangerous,” not least to herself. Shouldn’t she have married a Bolshevik after all, or at least reserved her whore-earnings against future cold spells? (“Czechs take Kazan; Archangel shelled by British; cholera in Petersburg”, runs a scene-setting montage.) “Say, Vladimir…” she frets, “you don’t suppose they’ll stop selling French lipstick in Moscow, do you?” With her gold Guerlain pencil now off the vanity table and in her hand, she continues to educate her spouse. “How should I ever get by without it?” Fortunately, she won’t have to. Marienhof being anything but subtle, the reason why she won’t gets foreshadowed on their first post-wedding morning, when the “coverlet severs her head at the shoulders” and “her hair flows like blood” down the pillow, reminding hubby of John the Baptist: “I am as proud and as happy as King Herod.”

Over 130 matrimonial pages later, she rings him up: in five minutes she will shoot herself. Her adorer rushes home, and there she is, awaiting him in bed, jolly and bloody, ha-ha!  (For Cynics, you must admit, is a real laugh.) “‘I imagine I shall be dead by this evening,’ she says… The operation is carried out without chloroform… She struggles to open her eyes and says: ‘Don’t be a cretin… I just can’t stand lying here without any lipstick on… I must be a frightful sight.’”  Then down to death she goes, obedient to the hordes of Red prophets. “Our terror shall not be individual,” says one, “but it shall be a mass terror, a class terror.’” So they divide the bourgeoisie into three categories: liquidate the first, lock up the second and set the third to “menial labor”.

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Olga, in her own way, picks the first. As for the enema-bringer, he may not be as “idiotically romantic’ as we suppose. “I hate my love,” he says, “I would tie a stone weight to its neck and drown it.” Never mind how spoiled she is; both spouses are self-destructive ditherers leeching off capital to which the Revolution is entitled. Sometimes I find them pitiable, but never admirable. Nor is any other character, not even Vladimir’s Bolshevik brother Sergei. So now you know why The Cynics remained unpublished in its native Russian until 1988, when Sovietism was senile and dying.

As for Marienhof himself, though he had fought on the frontline in the First World War, involuntary service for the Tsar hardly impressed the Bolsheviks. About that slaughter Solzhenitsyn remarked: “It isn’t the advancing armies, the fires, and the bombing that make war terrible, it’s terrible mainly because it gives stupidity legitimate power over intelligence.” Cynics takes a comparable view of the Revolution itself: “My brother,” says Vladimir, “had been given as tutors three commanding officers, each one decorated, like most Russian generals, with senility and defeat.” Olga wants to work for the Soviet government, and Sergei wants Olga. Now what exactly can she do for the Revolution? Since she “of course” does not know much of anything, Sergei decides that “in that case, you’ll have to be given a position of responsibility.” The Party was not amused. Cynics first appeared in Berlin in 1928; after 1930, its author would be unpublishable for life.

Worse yet for Marienhof, he was co-founder and core member of the Imaginists, a literary group who instead of accepting that art must follow ideology dared propound that art’s mission is simply to make images. These, in turn, can address each other through literary tropes, as in the best sentences in Cynics:

The stars look as though they have been washed with good-quality perfumed soap and dried with a Turkish towel… The brazen moon sheds streams of cold copper. They have soaked me through… But what does the moon have to do with it?… It’s love that’s to blame…! I spit in its eyes and talk to it like a drunken pimp demanding his nightly receipts from some little trollop.

Doesn’t that make you reach for your enema hose?

Marienhof’s Imaginist colleague and possible lover Sergei Yesenin dedicated works to him. In due course, those dedications necessarily got deleted. For this was, you see, a happy, happy time. Yesenin just happened to be under his own dark cloud. Arrested and rearrested, he kept getting out of trouble, but hanged himself in 1925, with or without the “help” of the OGPU secret police. Doubtless that event failed to brighten Marienhof’s already sunny disposition. But why shouldn’t he give us a chuckle? After giving herself to Sergei, Olga comes home, finds Vladimir sampling Marfusha and says: “Pray don’t go to sleep… once you’ve finished ‘draining the cup of pleasure.’ I’ve brought… new Imaginist poems. We can laugh at them together.”

The communist and fascist movements of the Twenties provoked artistic engagement with mass consciousness. In 1927, following a stimulating but unfulfilling visit to Moscow — his Latvian beloved not being in the mood — Walter Benjamin wrote that the city “reveals a full range of possibilities in schematic form: above all, the possibility that the Revolution will fail or succeed. In either case, something unforeseeable will result… The outlines of this are brutally and distinctly visible among the people and their environment.” In other words, here was a theater for Bolshevism to perform itself in; likewise a laboratory mixing-vessel, school, dungeon and inspiration. The operation will be carried out without chloroform.

In Dziga Vertov’s astounding 1929 film-about-itself Man with a Movie Camera, the masses constitute one animated Leviathan. We follow their frenetic detachments, from dawn to dusk, of a single composite day. Cynics’s very distant cousin, James Joyce’s Ulysses, was a stream-of-consciousness recounting of another single day, in Dublin, in 1904. Comparing that 1922 work to Cynics would be a tedious, slippery endeavor. Let me simply say that this city likewise “reveals a full range of possibilities in schematic form”. Dublin’s parts are concrete, identifiable, while like the characters they stand in for semi-unconscious mythic things.

Andrei Bely’s Petersburg — also 1922 — was set a year later than Ulysses, in allusion to the bloody confrontation between the masses and Tsar Nicholas II. Its doom-ridden, symbol-overgrown weirdness places it in the same genus as Cynics, to which it is much superior. The translators of the edition I own note that Bely is “constantly invoking the gray faceless masses of the metropolis… Ultimately there are no private thoughts or private actions; all are reflexes of larger realities.” Whether Marienhof’s Olga and Vladimir actually generate private thoughts or are merely parodic “reflexes of large realities” is for the reader to decide. (I see them as somewhere between brain surgeons and enema hoses.) In both novels, reality’s playthings sense with dread that “something unforeseeable”, whose onset if not yet its character is “brutally and distinctly visible”, and which will soon overturn the known. “The coffins lined the paths…” writes Bely. “Time sharpens its teeth for everything — it devours body and soul and stone.”

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I should also mention Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), which employed montage in the fashion of Cynics, causing Walter Benjamin to enthuse that this might show literature a new way forward. Like Petersburg, it is a work of a genius, whereas Cynics is a work of mordant promise. That promise might have been fulfilled had Marienhof been better treated. As it is, the book remains worth reading for its patches of Imaginist lyricism.

Now here’s another montage for you, courtesy of Cynics: the district morgue, capacity 12 corpses, now houses 300. Another: in comes official news on “the results of experiments in baking bread from rotten potatoes.” That bread might go divinely with potage à la paysanne, peasant-style soup made from “liquid Smolensky clay and rich black Penza soil.” A horse dies, probably from hunger; Olga consoles the coachman with a bourgeois diamond. Meanwhile the authorities advise the hungry to seek food elsewhere at the expense of class enemies: “Worker! Peasant! To the kulaks’ granaries for bread!” The kulaks were rich peasants. If they were well off, then they must be criminals; war communism was brilliant at quick, cruel solutions.

When that gave way to the New Economic Policy (NEP), which temporarily reenabled small-scale capitalist enterprises, cruelty grew more capricious, not to mention speckled with corruption. Benjamin observed “members of the opposition removed from important posts… countless Jews removed from middle-level posts… The leftist movements which had proved useful during… war communism are now being completely discarded.” As Olga put it: “That most beautiful of mothers is giving birth to a monster.” After her $15,000 NEP-man lover recounts his triumphant speculation in paraffin, Vladimir ingenuously tattles to his brother, who gets the fellow arrested. Olga smilingly feeds her husband one of the NEP-man’s chocolates. And history goes on making progress, like a scalpel in flesh. Another jaunty montage sums up Marienhof’s theme: “There are reports of cannibalism on a mass scale.”

Appearing at the start of the 1987 edition of the military historian Evan Mawdsley’s The Russian Civil War, this judgement resonates more deeply today. The system the Bolsheviks created has collapsed and vanished. A rebooted version of the Cheka, or All-Russian Extraordinary Commission — the secret police founded by Lenin that established the new society by the use of terror and, through its successors the OGPU, NKVD and KGB, shaped Soviet life until its end — continues to be the core of the Russian state. Yet the country it governs — featuring an oligarchical type of capitalism intertwined with state security structures, a restored Orthodox Church and a Eurasian-flavoured variety of imperialism — is unimaginably different from anything envisioned by the founders of the Soviet state.

An attempt to exterminate completely a section of humankind, the Holocaust was surely the most authentically apocalyptic episode in human history. Yet Russia’s civil war did display several of the features that go with an apocalyptic event. Understanding this neglected period may enable us to understand how far our own time is — and is not — an apocalyptic moment of this kind.

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In waves of terror beginning in August 1918, when Lenin was injured in an attempted assassination, the new Soviet regime killed its own citizens on a previously unknown scale. During the two months that followed, around 15,000 people were executed for political crimes — more than twice the total number of prisoners of all kinds executed in the previous century of tsarist rule (6,321). Taken together, the casualties of the Revolution, the 1918 terror, the civil war and the ensuing famine cost the lives of around 25 million people in the territories of the former Tsarist empire — 18 times the number of casualties it incurred in the First World War (1.3 to 1.4 million.)

For the rulers of the new state, the breakdown of the old order was an opportunity to refashion society on a new model. “Former persons” — aristocrats, landlords and priests, together with anyone who employed others — were stripped of civil rights and denied ration cards and housing. Many dying of starvation or from hard labour in the concentration camps Lenin had established, these human remnants of the past watched as their entire way of life was erased. The same was true of the peasantry, whose recurrent rebellions were crushed with savage force. In the large-scale uprising in the Tambov region in 1920-21, Soviet forces used poisonous gas to clear forests into which the peasants had fled.

The famine that ensued killed around 5 million people in 1921-1922. The cause was not just drought and a bad harvest. As a result of the collapse of railways, health and waste disposal services, epidemic diseases such as typhus and cholera were rampant. Cities were depopulated and their wooden buildings demolished and used for firewood. Grain requisitioning and the export of agricultural produce created mass starvation of a peculiarly horrific kind. Russian may be the only language that contains two words for cannibalism. One — trupoyedstvo — denotes the eating of corpses, the other — lyudoyedstvo — killing in order to consume the victim. According to some reports at the time, public markets for human flesh appeared in famine-struck areas in which body parts from cadavers in the latter category commanded higher prices on account of their freshness.

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If one of the meanings of apocalypse is a sudden shift to conditions that were hitherto almost unimaginable, this period of history certainly qualifies. But the years from 1917-23 were apocalyptic in another sense. The Soviet state was believed — by the new government and its progressivist camp-followers in the West, if not by the majority of Russians — to be building a society that would be better than any that had existed before. Curiously, the collapse of the Soviet state was greeted in the West with an outbreak of apocalyptic optimism much like that which accompanied its foundation.

On October 27, 1989, a couple of weeks before the Berlin Wall fell, I wrote:

What we are witnessing in the Soviet Union is not the end of history, but instead its resumption — and on decidedly traditional lines. All the evidence suggests that we are now moving back into an epoch that is classically historical…Ours is an era in which political ideology, liberal as much as Marxist, has a rapidly dwindling leverage on events, and more ancient, more primordial forces, nationalist and religious, fundamentalist and soon, perhaps, Malthusian, are contesting with each other…If the Soviet Union does indeed fall apart, that beneficent catastrophe will not inaugurate a new era of post-historical harmony, but a return to the classical terrain of history, a terrain of great-power rivalries, secret diplomacies and irredentist claims.

Visiting the US at the time, I was amused to find this view dismissed as apocalyptic pessimism. In think tanks, political gatherings and business conferences across the land, the fantastical notion that a new era had begun was embraced as sober realism. In line with this thinking, a number of Right-wing foundations cancelled their international relations programmes on the ground that foreign and defence policy would no longer be needed.

That a reversion to history as usual should be unthinkable testifies to the mind-numbing power of secular faith. While progressive ideologies are often divided into reformist and revolutionary varieties, the difference is not fundamental. Both rest on the faith that history is an accretive process in which meaning and value are conserved and increased.

Actually history is repeatedly punctuated by discontinuities in which what was gained is irrecoverably lost. Whether because of war or revolution, famine or epidemic — or a deadly combination, as in the Russian Civil War — the sudden death of ways of life is a regular occurrence. Certainly there are periods of incremental improvement, but they rarely last longer than two or three generations. Progress occurs in interludes when history is idling.

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In the theistic religions from which the idea is derived, apocalypse means a final revelation that comes with the end of time. Elected during the Roman plague of 590 from which his predecessor Pelagius II had died, Pope Gregory the Great wrote: “The end of the world is no longer just predicted, but is revealing itself.”

But the world did not end; the four horsemen came and went, while history stumbled on. In the eschatological sense in which Gregory understood it, there is no such thing as apocalypse. But if it means the end of particular worlds that human beings have fashioned for themselves, apocalypse is a recurrent historical experience.

When you read diaries of people who lived through the revolution in Russia, you find them looking on in disbelief as the vast, centuries-old empire of the Romanovs melted into nothing in a matter of months. Few then accepted that the world they knew had gone forever. Even so, they were haunted by the suspicion that it would not return. Many had a similar experience in continental Europe when the Great War destroyed what Stefan Zweig, in his elegiac memoir The World of Yesterday (1941), called “the world of security”.

We find ourselves in an analogous time today. We will not wake up, after lockdown, in the same old world and find it just a bit worse, as the French novelist and provocateur Michel Houllebecq has asserted. (Dismissing the virus as “banal”, he observed that it is “not even sexually transmitted”. In fact recent reports suggest it may be transmissible through semen.)

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Much in the way we lived before the virus is already irretrievable. Probably a vaccine will be developed along with treatments that reduce the virus’ lethality. But this will likely take years, and in the meantime our lives will have altered beyond recognition. Even when it arrives, a deus ex machina will not dispel popular dread of another wave of infections or a new virus. More than government-enforced policies, public attitudes will prevent any reversion to pre-Covid ways.

The relevant comparison here is not with previous pandemics such as the Spanish Flu, but instead the more recent impact of terrorism. The numbers killed in terrorist incidents may be small. But the threat is endemic, and the texture of everyday life has altered profoundly. Video cameras and security procedures in public places have become part of the way we live.

Covid-19 may not be an exceptionally lethal pathogen, but it is fearful enough. Soon temperature checks will be ubiquitous and surveillance via mobile phones omnipresent. Social distancing, in one form or another, will be entrenched everywhere beyond the home. The impact on the economy will be immeasurable. Enterprises that adapt quickly will thrive, but sectors that relied on pre-Covid lifestyles — pubs, restaurants, sporting events, discos and airline travel, for example — will shrink or disappear. The old life of carefree human intermingling will fast slip from memory.

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Some occupations may gain in power and status. Health and care workers need more than applause for their efforts. Better pay and conditions will be demanded, and may well be achieved. Workers in other low-paid jobs and the gig economy are likely to fare more badly than before.

The impact on the “knowledge classes” will be far-reaching. Higher education operates on a model of student living that social distancing has rendered defunct. Museums, journalism, publishing and the arts all face similar shocks. Automation and artificial intelligence will wipe out swathes of middle class employment. Accelerating a trend that has been underway for decades, the remains of bourgeois life will be swept away.

As pre-Covid life fades into history, large sections of the professional classes face a version of the experience of those who became former persons in the abrupt historical shifts of the last century. The redundant bourgeoisie need not fear starvation or concentration camps, but the world they have inhabited is evanescing before their eyes. There is nothing novel in what they are experiencing. History is a succession of such apocalypses, and so far this one is milder than most.