kirilov

A country boy come to a big city does, when all is said and done, have eighteen or so years of history behind him. It is that history that makes him comprehensible to us. How would we understand him if chronologically he where eighteen but characterologically, a parentless newborn babe? His character would then necessarily lie entirely in his future rather than in his past. He could only be what he would become, and so at the outset he could only be a kind of living question mark.

-excerpt from God: A Biography