Read Online Monumental Propaganda by Vladímir Voinóvich - Free Book Online

here,” he said, turning his head this way and that, “apart from myself. So tell me, Aglaya Stepanovna, in what way can I, for instance, be of assistance to yourself?”
    While Aglaya presented the essential facts, he finished folding up his little book, tore one page out of it, curved it into a little trough and reached out for a silk tobacco pouch lying in front of him with an intricately embroidered, faded inscription: SMOKE AND DON’T COUGH. This pouch of his contained homegrown tobacco—in other words, the kind that people used to grow, dry and shred themselves. If they shredded it with the roots, they got relatively weak shag or makhorka, but if only the leaves went into the mix, it could be so strong that it made the most inveterate smokers cough and choke, with tears spurting from their eyes as if they were clowns in the circus. This tobacco was popularly known as “samson,” and there was a widespread belief that in young men it stimulated sexual activity and in old men, sleep, although it is hard to imagine that any regular smoker of such poison had even the slightest chance of living to be an old man. Nechitailo took a generous pinch of samson out of the pouch, scattered it evenly along his curved trough, moistened the edge of the paper with spittle and chewed it with his front teeth to make it stick better, twisted together a tightly packed roll-up as thick as his thumb and took out of his pocket a cigarette lighter made from a rifle cartridge with a little wheel at the side.
    â€œFrontline souvenir,” he said to Aglaya, and struck the flame. There was a smell of bad tobacco and burning paper. Nechitailo struggled to light his roll-up, his eyes popping out of his head and his cheeks flapping in and out, making sounds like a steam engine: “Chuff-choo, chuff-choo, chuff-choo.”
    As Nechitailo puffed away, the tobacco crackled and snapped, scattering sparks in every direction. When the roll-up eventually lit, Bogdan Filippovich inhaled with relish and began to cough, wheezing as if he were in his death agony, and disappeared for a while in a swirling, dark gray mass.
    â€œAnd so,” Aglaya concluded her story, “I’m asking you, is it really possible to allow a man like Shubkin to be involved in educating our Soviet children?”
    â€œYes, I think it is,” she heard a voice say out of the smoke, which by this time had begun to disperse, and Nechitailo emerged from it like an airplane out of a cloud. “I think it is possible,” he repeated, holding the roll-up in his left hand and waving away the smoke with his right, “and in general let me tell you, Comrade Revkina, approximately the following. As you know, the Party’s new policy emphasizes a considerate attitude toward personnel. Not the way things used to be—the slightest thing and off with his head. People have to be treated what I’d call humanely. Especially people like Shubkin. You could call him a man of unique intellect. He has two college-level educations, speaks twelve languages fluently and can use all the rest with a dictionary. And his memory is simply phenomenal. I can tell you he rattles off by heart the
Odyssey
”—Nechitailo bent down his little finger—“the
Iliad
”—he bent down his ring finger and went on bending down the rest of his fingers and thumbs as he ran through his list—“
Eugene Onegin,
Mendeleev’s periodic table, the ‘evergreen’ chess game, the ‘Song of the Stormy Petrel,’ the fourth chapter of the
History of the CPSU
(B.) and Lenin’s work ‘What the “Friends of the People” Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats.’ I didn’t believe it myself, Aglaya Stepanovna, but I followed him with the text and he just reeled it all off, word for word straight out of his head. You see! Not just a head, you might say, more like an entire Council of