Write me and tell me what you manage to do with these stories. (The Tibetan one can be used in its entirety, I think.)
I kiss you, my dear one!
DECEMBER 31
Hello, Marusya! The soldiers may have holidays every day now, but for us it’s double the work. But it’s pleasant work, watching, observing everything, letting my eyes wander where they will. And occasionally I see something amusing. Dmitrenko’s The Good Miller, or Satan in a Barrel. A comedy with dancing, song, and vodka. Vodka is prohibited here, but there’s still dancing and singing. And our band accompanies the singing. I enjoyed myself immensely during the rehearsals. I felt like an actor in an opera house. The barracks has a fully equipped stage. We were arranged in front of the footlights before instrument stands, as is the practice. In the center was the conductor, to his right the flautist and clarinetist, and to the left, the brass. And, as is the practice, the bandmaster signaled to the choir and the actors. And, as one might expect, they sang mercilessly out of tune, and their timing was off. Besides the performance of The Miller, a ballerina will dance for these sweet soldier boys. Today there was a tryout. There were two ballerinas, one of them rather plump, and the other with dyed hair, a sealskin coat, a sharp nose—overall, rather catlike. They dance well, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. The mazurka, the lezginka, Russian dances. The officers onstage flocked around them as men will flock around women upon whom the magic glow of the footlights casts a spell of enchantment mixed with the promise of accessibility.
The soldiers stared at them like they were seeing the Crystal Palace, like something lovely and completely distant from them, almost unearthly. The actors and actresses from The Miller huddled around the corners of the stage. The bandmaster looked on with an expression of irony, as though he had seen it all before.
Yesterday the celebration of the Eighth Company took place. I felt very happy with it. And extremely surprised by it. It was a celebration in the true sense of that word—carried out in a foreign, not Russian, way. I was happy with the way it was organized. Everywhere I looked, I noticed an attention to detail. Everything had been anticipated and well planned. It was all very clean and orderly. The beds in their barracks had been shoved into one corner and covered with a green cloth. For the guests, there was a coat check, with hangers, numbers, and a rope barrier. There was a platform constructed of dining tables pushed together and draped with green kerchiefs around the edges. Everything was spacious, comfortable; different people were assigned to take care of every eventuality. It was evident that they had rehearsed their roles. When the concert was over, people appeared with tools in hand. Within two minutes, the platform was silently dismantled, someone rushed to wipe down the tables, someone else felt the edges of the tabletops to make sure there were no stray nails sticking out—and the concert hall turned into a buffet.
We played until four in the morning. Tonight we’re going to play the whole night again. I’m just a bit tired. Tomorrow is the last holiday. All of this carries an aura of madness that no one seems to notice. Yesterday I read the papers for the last three months in the library. There are no reliable statistics, but as far as I can tell, the war has already cost at least five million lives; and it’s impossible to even estimate how many wounded there are. At least twice that number, I should think. Despite this, the Entente refused the German offer of peace. Our life, the only life we have, which promises so much to us, is unfolding against a background of unrelenting global madness …
Your Jacob
33 Kiev–Moscow
(1917–1925)
Jacob, who got caught up in political activity during the first months after the February Revolution, became a member of the Kharkov Soviet of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, but always felt somewhat out of place. The majority of the people around him were so backward and unenlightened, many of them illiterate, that he saw his primary task as one of education. Although he could have a conversation with each one of these people individually, when they came together in a crowd they turned into a raging, terrifying force of nature. His oratorical experiments quickly led him to the conclusion that, in this powerful revolutionary process, Jews provoked only irritation. His innate industriousness and energy constantly agitated people, and his desire to prove useful to his country in this hour of need, to rebuild its industry and reorganize its principles of management, inspired suspicion. Jacob tried to find a place for himself in all of this that corresponded to his ideals and his skills, but could not.
Ukraine reeled, shaken to its very foundations. The government in Kiev had changed seventeen times in the space of two years, and the inhabitants wanted something permanent, something that would remain once and for all. And something did. By December 1919, Soviet power was finally established.
Marusya, who was an enthusiastic supporter of the new dispensation, celebrated the victory over the bourgeois world. As early as 1917, when the Soviet authorities conquered power in Kiev for the first time, Marusya joined a group of politically engaged actors who were staging a Symbolist play called Revolutionary Movements under the direction of a young man from Galicia named Les Kurbas.
Immediately following this grandiose staging, which met with great success before large gatherings of people in the city squares, Marusya quarreled with Les Kurbas. She spoke Ukrainian fluently, but she reproached him for his excessive Ukrainian nationalism. She was certain that complete internationalism would reign in the new government, and that small national cultures would give way to a new, universal proletarian culture. This ended her career in the “Young Theater” that Kurbas directed. Who could have predicted that in 1937 Kurbas would be executed in the Solovki labor camp for his nationalist deviationism? Not to mention that, half a century later, culture really would achieve a certain degree of universalism—although its proletarian character would be forgotten, as though it had never been, because of the complete exhaustion of the Marxist notion of the vanguard role of the working classes. But Jacob was not with Marusya at that moment, and could not bring his conciliatory corrections to bear in the dispute. Indeed, Jacob himself, with his highly organized mind, was not given to such historical prognoses. He may have been ahead of his time, but not so far ahead as that.
When Jacob returned to Kiev, he dived headfirst into professional activity. Big changes were under way at the Commercial Institute. The professor who had insisted on his being appointed as assistant in the department left with the Germans. The docent Kalashnikov, who was scared to death, assumed his vacated position. A curious situation developed in which, in the eyes of the senior professors, Jacob appeared to be a revolutionary, and the people who were appointed by the authorities to run the Institute were astonishingly ill-informed professionally.
The authorities assigned the economists tasks that were formidable: nationalization of the economy, the halting of trade and cutting monetary ties, the introduction of a surplus appropriation system,… “military communism.” Jacob despaired. Building some sort of new economy was out of the question.
The new way of life, organized along the lines of fairness and justice, dealt a direct blow to Jacob’s family: the milling manufacture and transport along the Dnieper, which his father had built up at the turn of the century, was nationalized. The mill, which had worked punctiliously for nearly twenty years, was shut down. Jacob abandoned his budding career in the Commercial Institute and took a job in the Department of Statistics at the Ukrainian People’s Commissariat of Labor. In the country’s current situation, the only real task he could envision for himself was to document honestly the economic process as it unfolded. His energies now contracted to discussions within his immediate family, and his primary interlocutor was still Marusya, who was committed to the idea of building the grand future.