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A new collection of police reports gives a detailed account of Alexander Pushkin's life:
Apart from genealogical investigations into the Russian nobility and school reports revealing Pushkin was a mediocre student, the book is filled with police documents. The poet was exiled from Moscow and Petersburg, several times, and throughout his youth and adult years, he was under permanent surveillance.
Evgeny Zamyatin's very short story: Pictures.
Birds that eat salt,
hang about cemeteries,
forage in abandoned lots,
civil war crows
fattened on carnage
from roadside bombs,
gorged vultures
loping from body
to body, picking
eyes clean
before clambering
up into trees
that have survived
hanging still
over the silent
beach.
--by Indran Amirthanayagam, from his new volume: The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems, newly released from Hanging Loose Press. Congratulations, Indran!
During the period Osip Mandelshtam wrote this piece (1928-1930), which was only published posthumously in 1967, the traditional fairytale was officially out of favor. N.K. Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, led an official campaign against the fairlytale, claiming that the anthropomorphization of animals was not considered scientifically correct; children's literature was meant to educate, not merely to entertain. This is Mandelshtam's response to that campaign.
It is a difficult task to write children's literature. On the one hand, the anthropomorphization of animals and inanimate objects is forbidden; on the other hand, a child must play, but that little rascal spoils everything as soon as he begins to play by immediately anthropomorphizing everything. Children's literature must be strictly supervised. This requires a scientific approach and well-trained, experienced middle-aged women. A certain scientificcally trained older woman of my acquaintance had mastered the ideology to such an extent that she was literally torn to pieces. Now she works as a consultant and attends conferences sponsored by the State Academic Council. She was not immediately promoted, although she had first class credentials: she had once been a child herself, and she had an exceptionally lively mind for her age. Outwardly, this old woman appeared quite ordinary, rather tidy, carefully dressed. She supported herself, and since the age of sixty, she had earned her livelihood through literary work.
Nevertheless, even she did not hit the target immediately, and was forced to beat around the bush for some time. First, she thought she would give the old way a try, so she submitted a fairytale that was completley inappropriate and even harmful. Literally every insect and animal in her story had something to say; grasshoppers sporting frockcoats served some prince, and a rabbit played the drums. Whoever read the story would grow dizzy, as if he had taken an overdose of camomile. Frankly speaking, the devil alone knows what it was all about.
It was the rabbit who saved the old woman. She ought to erect a monument to his memory.
"Your rabbit will do," said the exhausted secretary. "Drumming, after all, is a form..."
The old woman returned home and quickly re-educated herself. In the next story she submitted, the sheep and the rams were embarrassed to say "baa" and "maa." As the tale was told, the sheep silently grew wool for a useful purpose. In recognition of the story's transformation, the editor himself came out to greet the old woman and express his views, however vaguely: "It fits the production plan, even though it's a bit boring..."
That night the old woman had a dream. She saw a rabbit drummer shear a sheep, gather the wool on his drum and then carry it to some board meeting, where the board members talked incessantly, sniffed the wool, and then broke up quite late in the evening...
