Free The Stalin Epigram by Robert Littell

heart.
    I will need a moment to collect my thoughts.
    What I have recalled up to now is more or less the gist. But when the earth stopped dead, so too did time; things proceeded at the speed of a mountain eroding, so I am able to reconstruct the
moment with absolute accuracy. Osip halted so abruptly the woman pushing the stroller had to swerve to avoid him. Borisik and I looked inquisitively at him, then at each other, then at Osip again.
He appeared to be shrugging off a great burden. His breathing became as calm as the drafts of air you would expect to find in the eye of a hurricane. “So that’s how it is,” he
said, more to himself than to us. And forgetting his decaying teeth, he smiled a genuine smile.
    Both Borisik and I were mystified. “What?” I asked.
    “But that puts everything into perspective!” Osip declared. “Hamlet feigns madness to justify his failure to act. I feign sanity to justify my failure to
act, since no sane person can be expected to do what I must do.”
    Osip couldn’t have missed the look of confusion in my eyes. “What must you do?” I demanded.
    Borisik, who had a sixth sense for matters of the spirit, said very quietly, “He has been putting off confronting his Kremlin mountaineer. What he feels he must do compels him to act
against his essential nature, inasmuch as poets don’t dirty their hands in politics.”
    And then, as if a dam had given way, a torrent of words spilled from Osip’s lips. “In the beginning, God forgive us, many of us shared Mayakovsky’s optimistic view of the
Revolution—the Bolsheviks seemed to have a moral dimension, a hunger to improve the lot of the masses. But we didn’t reckon on the Kremlin mountaineer climbing over the bodies of his
colleagues and reaching the top of the pyramid ahead of them. Stalin makes Caligula, Cesare Borgia, Ivan the Terrible look like humanitarians.”
    I saw Borisik shaking his head in anxious disagreement. “There is no evidence that Stalin knows what’s going on,” he said. “It could be Yagoda who is behind the forced
collectivization and the famine and the mass arrests. The Cheka has always acted as a state within a state.”
    “This is not the first time we’ve had this argument,” Osip insisted, clearly exasperated. “What will it take to convince you I’m right, Boris, a photograph of
Stalin on the front page of Pravda with a smoking revolver in his fist? Something is rotten in these Soviet Socialist Republics! He knows, for God’s sake. He’s
behind every arrest, every execution, every deportation to Siberia. Nothing happens without his approval in this unweeded garden —your phrase, Boris, taken from the lips of the Hamlet
who feigns madness. Absolutely nothing! ”
    If I shut my eyes and catch my breath, I can still make out Borisik delivering the lines in English: “ ’Tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
possess it merely. ”
    In his eagerness to explain himself, Osip was almost tripping over words now. “Red Terror didn’t start yesterday, it began when that poor creature Fanny Kaplan tried to kill Lenin in
1923—that night the order, countersigned by Stalin, went out to execute White prisoners by the thousands. He’s been at it ever since, killing hope, pushing us deeper and deeper into a
new ice age. He has to be stopped before he runs riot and drowns a hundred and fifty million people in teardrops.” Wincing in agitation, Osip came up with some lines I recognized from one of
his older poems. “. . . Your spine has been shattered, my splendid derelict, my age . . . My dear Anna, my dear Boris, I confide in you because you of all people will comprehend me. I know how to go about destroying him! It needs only a spark. We have heard physicists speculate about the explosive power locked inside an atom. I am deeply committed to the proposition
that an explosive power resides in the nucleus of a poem, too. I am able to release this