Stalin's Double

 

Stalin’s Double

In 1935, so the story goes, Joe Stalin decided he needed a double. They found (how?) a man named Evsej Lubitsky living in the town of Vinnitsa, Ukraine, where he worked as a book keeper. Evsej was separated, forcibly, from his family—they all were later murdered—and taken to a dacha outside Moscow, where cosmetologists, hairdressers worked him over, tailors and gypsy voodooers. He made his first appearance at a big meet-and-greet with visiting Scottish milliners, exemplary workers. No one, apparently, noticed that he was not Stalin.

 Evsej, it seems, kept his mouth shut most of the time, so that nobody could detect the absence of a Georgian accent in his speech. He made appearances in the Stalin loge at the Bolshoj Theatre, and on some festive occasions he even waved from the top of the Lenin Mausoleum on Red Square. Among Soviet leaders only Molotov, Kaganovich and Malenkov were said to be in on the joke.

 Sometimes Stalin had his double meet with the big brass in the Kremlin—Khrushchev, Beria, Yezhov—seated in Stalin’s own armchair, saying absolutely nothing but staring hard, staring hard, while the bigwigs sweated profusely (What kind of trick is he pulling now?). Watching them sweat from an adjoining room, through a special peephole, the real Stalin chuckled into his mustache. Once the two Stalins walked into a drawing room replete with top generals and communist officials—they made their appearance from opposite directions, and the befuddled guests were left to figure out which Stalin to kiss up to. Just to be on the safe side, they kissed up to both.

 In 1952 Evsej was arrested and probably would have been shot, had not Stalin himself died a year later. He was freed under the condition that he go live in Central Asia and tell no one of his role as double. He spent the rest of his life in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, dying there in 1981.

 Evsej Lubitsky was one of at least four men who, ostensibly, worked, at one time or another, as Stalin’s doubles. One of them, Felix Dadaev, recently died at age 88. He had requested permission, of Putin, to publish his autobiography, and it appeared in 2008.

 (excerpted from the book by U.R. Bowie, Here We Be. Where Be We?)

Translaton of Poem by Fyodor Tyutchev, "Тени сизые смесились," "Blended were the shadows dove-blue"

                                                                           Nathan Altman

Федор Тютчев

(1803-1873)

 

Тени сизые смесились,
Цвет поблекнул, звук уснул —
Жизнь, движенье разрешились
В сумрак зыбкий, в дальний гул…
Мотылька полет незримый
Слышен в воздухе ночном…
Час тоски невыразимой!..
Всё во мне, и я во всем!..

Сумрак тихий, сумрак сонный,
Лейся в глубь моей души,
Тихий, томный, благовонный,
Все залей и утиши —
Чувства мглой самозабвенья
Переполни через край!..
Дай вкусить уничтоженья,
С миром дремлющим смешай!

1830s

 

Literal Translation

Dove-blue shadows blended,

The blossom faded, sound went to sleep.

Life, movement were resolved

Into a quavering twilight, a faraway hum…

The unseen flight of a moth

Could be heard in the night air…

The hour of ineffable anguish!

Everything is in me, and I am in everything!

 

Twilight silent, twilight sleepy,

Flow into the depths of my soul,

Silent, languid, fragrant,

Wash over everything and quiet it.

With the murk of self-forgetfulness

Fill up my feelings over the brim!

Give me to taste annihilation,

Blend [me] with the drowsing world!

 

 

Literary Translation/Adaptation by U.R. Bowie

 Blended were the shadows dove-blue,

Blossoms faded, sounds sleep sought.

Stilled life, pure motion hitherto,

In gloaming quailed, droned on distraught.

A moth unseen in flight hummed by,

Cast o’er the night his grievous pall.

An anguish untold, gloom’s soft sigh,

And all in me, and I in all!

 

Gloaming silent, twilight sleepy,

Into my soul’s deep sanctum flow,

Silent, languid, fragrant deeply,

Wash and soothe the wear and woe.

With abnegation’s murk the cup

Of feelings fill to apogee.

Extinction’s honeydew I’ll sup,

With somnolence commingle me!

 

d

Translation by Vladimir Nabokov

 Dusk

Now the ashen shadows mingle,

Tints are faded, sounds remote.

Life has dwindled to a single

Vague reverberating note.

In the dusk I hear the humming

Of a moth I cannot see.

Whence is this oppression coming?

I’m in all, and all’s in me.

 

Gloom so dreamy, gloom so lulling,

Flow into my deepest deep,

Flow, ambrosial and dulling,

Steeping everything in sleep.

With oblivion’s obscuration

Fill my senses to the brim,

Make me taste obliteration,

In this dimness let me dim.

Dates of translation: 1941-1944

From Vladimir Nabokov, Verses and Versions (edited by Brian Boyd and Stanislav Shvabrin), Harcourt, 2008, p. 251.

                                                                 Note on Tolstoy and Tyutchev

Lev Tolstoy loved reading and re-reading Tyutchev's verse; he learned many of the poems by heart, including this one. In his diary (December 7, 1899) A.B. Goldenweiser writes how Tolstoy told him how much he loved "Blended were the shadows dove-blue" ("Dusk"), how he could not read it without weeping. Then he recited the poem aloud for Goldenweiser, "almost in a whisper, gasping and crying." See the two-volume Soviet collection of Tyutchev's verse (Moscow: Nauka, 1965), I, 366.

Consciously, or subconsciously, Tolstoy quoted from Tyutchev's poem in War and Peace, Vol. 4, Part 2, end of Ch. 14, lending the words to the imagination of Pierre Bezukhov, who is among Russian captives marching along with the retreating French army:

"The enormous, endless bivouac, noisy earlier with the loud crackling of campfires and the conversation of men, was growing still; the red flames of the campfires were dying out and turning pale. The full moon hung high in the bright sky. Invisible earlier past the bounds of the camp, forests and fields now opened out in the distance. And farther on, beyond these forests and fields, was the bright, wavering, endless distance calling one to blend with itself. Pierre looked into the sky, into the depths of the retreating, scintillating stars. 'And all of this is mine, and all of this is in me, and all of this is me!' thought Pierre. 'And all of this they've caught and stuck in a shed and boarded it up!' He smiled and went off to join his comrades, to lie down and sleep."

 

                                                               Aleksei Aronov

 

List of BOOK REVIEW ARTICLES, posted on blog "U.R. Bowie on Russian Literature" and on Dactyl Review website

 

Book Review Articles by U.R. Bowie

(Posted on blog “U.R. Bowie on Russian Literature” and on Dactyl Review Website)

[As of end of June, 2021]

 

Lee K. Abbott, ALL THINGS ALL AT ONCE

Julian Barnes, THE SENSE OF AN ENDING

Elif Batuman, THE IDIOT

David Bezmozgis, THE FREE WORLD

David Bezmozgis, THE BETRAYERS

Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler

J.M. Coetzee, THE MASTER OF PETERSBURG

Don DeLillo, LIBRA

Jeffrey Eugenides, THE VIRGIN SUICIDES

Penelope Fitzgerald, THE BEGINNING OF SPRING

Ford Madox Ford, THE GOOD SOLDIER

Michael Frayn, THE TRICK OF IT

Paul Fung, DOSTOEVSKY AND THE EPILEPTIC MODE OF BEING

Lauren Groff, FLORIDA

Aleksandar Hemon, THE MAKING OF ZOMBIE WARS

Aleksandar Hemon, LOVE AND OBSTACLES

Kazuo Ishiguro, A PALE VIEW OF HILLS

Cormac McCarthy, THE ROAD

Ian McEwan, NUTSHELL

Ian McEwan, ENDURING LOVE

Vladimir Nabokov, LETTERS TO VERA

Viet Thanh Nguyen, THE SYMPATHIZER

Edna O’Brien, NIGHT

Tim O'Brien, THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

Tea Obreht, THE TIGER'S WIFE

Sarah Quigley, THE CONDUCTOR

George Saunders, CIVILWARLAND in BAD DECLINE

George Saunders, TENTH OF DECEMBER

George Saunders, LINCOLN IN THE BARDO

Marian Schwartz Translation of ANNA KARENINA

W.G. Sebald, AUSTERLITZ

Maxim D. Shrayer, LEAVING RUSSIA: A JEWISH STORY

Maxim D. Shrayer, BUNIN AND NABOKOV

Olga Tokarczuk, FLIGHTS

Meg Wolitzer (editor), THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES, 2017

 

Miscellaneous Articles Posted on Blog by U.R. Bowie

THE GREAT BOONDOGGLE OF THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY

A Personal and Critical Essay on FLANNERY O'CONNOR

THE DANCING BEAR IN THE GRAND RUSSIAN ROUND AND ROUND

Russian Attitudes toward Humor and Irony: NIKOLAI GOGOL

The Onomastics of the Russian Leaders (The History of Surnames)

On the Russian "Narod" (Common Man) and On Playing Games of Make Believe

THE TATAR YOKE AND THE CHECHEN WARS

ON LITERARY TRANSLATION. Translating Substandard Speech (просторечие), IVAN BUNIN

ON LITERARY TRANSLATION: "Sympathy for the Traitor"

MAX ERNST and The Transgressive Nature of Looking

 

 

 

 

 

WEED PEASE PORRIDGE, from Bobby Goosey's Nonsense Verse for Kids