Read Online The Stalin Epigram by Robert Littell - Free Book Online Page B

us, a line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet .
    We burst into laughter—my heart aches now as I recall the scene, for it was destined to be the last time the three of us would laugh together. In a manner of speaking, laughter vanished
from our lives on that sun-drenched Thursday in April, anno Domini 1934.
    A trolley came churning along the street, sparks flecking from the electric cable overhead, and with a shriek of metal on metal skidded to a stop in front of us. I waved to the motorman to
signal we weren’t getting on. Neither, apparently, was the woman pushing the child in the stroller. The motorman called grumpily through the open door, “Thems that aren’t waiting
for trolleys, comrades, oughtn’t be sitting at trolley stops.” Jerking closed his doors, he headed off down the street.
    Borisik groaned. “What is it about us and the new order that we can’t even get trolley etiquette right?”
    “It’s the story of my life,” I said. “Do you really think there is a regulation restricting these benches to trolley passengers?”
    “Why not?” Osip said irritably. “There are regulations for everything else, including the writing of poetry.”
    Borisik said, “According to the article in Pravda, Stalin himself spelled out the new regulations during a meeting with writers at Gorky’s villa.”
    “Socialist realism,” I said, “makes me want to throw up.”
    “It will not have escaped you that none of us was invited to this meeting between Stalin and the so-called engineers of the human soul ,” Borisik said. “What do you make
of this?”
    And then Osip uttered something that astonished us. “Stalin was paying us a great compliment. With his peasant’s instinct for what is genuine and what is ersatz, he doesn’t put
us in the same pigeonhole as his writer-engineers.”
    I wasn’t sure whether Osip was speaking tongue-in-cheek. “Do you really think he is capable of distinguishing between art that is genuine and art that isn’t?”
    “The Kremlin mountaineer, as I have decided to call him, surely understands the difference between the poet or the dramatist or the composer who is willing to deliver the obligatory monody
to the everlasting glory of Stalin and those who, because of moral or esthetic scruples, are unwilling. If I had to make an educated guess, I would bet Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, to use his
Georgian name, is endowed with enough peasant common sense to realize that the artist who coughs up a monody on command delivers something devoid of artistic value; that the monodies he can’t
get are the ones he must have if his legend is to outlive his body.”
    We began walking again. I saw that the woman pushing the child in a stroller was a few paces behind us. “We have company,” I said under my breath.
    Borisik glanced back and grinned at the woman and she smiled back. “You’re becoming paranoid,” he told me. “She’s taking the sun like us.”
    “Let’s return to Hamlet, ” I suggested. “Borisik, explain, please, what you see in the play that brings you back to it, year after year.”
    Osip didn’t understand Borisik’s fascination with it either. “Tolstoy hit the nail on the head,” he said impatiently. “ Hamlet is little more than a vulgar
tale of pagan vengeance. The plot is relatively straightforward—a Danish prince seeks more and more proof that his uncle murdered his father because he can’t bring himself to act,
can’t bring himself to take revenge even when he has the proof. It’s a story about someone who is unable to deal with his own cowardice and so takes refuge from it in
madness.”
    “No, no, I don’t read it that way at all,” Borisik burst out. “ Hamlet is not mad; he feigns madness to justify his failure to act against his essential
nature.”
    And then something happened that, given how things turned out, now seems to me to be best conveyed by saying that I thought the earth had stopped dead in its tracks for the beat of a