“I drink to our ruined house,
to the dolor of my life,
to our loneliness together;
and to you I raise my glass,
to lying lips that have betrayed us,
to dead-cold, pitiless eyes,
and to the hard realities: 
that the world is brutal and coarse,
that God in fact has not saved us”
— Anna Akhmatova, The Last Toast, trans. Kunitz