Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0808220019350.3027@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Excerpt
Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:19:48 -0400 (EDT)
Excerpt January 25. I was working at the table while Seryozha was lying on the sofa and reading some tattered book with a green cover. Suddenly he jumped up and explained: "Sasha! Just a minute. Listen to this!" "I'm listening." As solemnly and loudly as if he were reading to an audience of thousands he read to me: "'To deliver up millions of men, superior minds, scientists, even geniuses, to the caprice and will of a being who in an instant of gaiety, madness, intoxication, or love, would not hesitate to sacrifice everything for his exalted fancy, will spend the wealth of the country amassed by others with difficulty, will have thousands of men slaughtered on the battlefields, all this appears to me, a simple logician, a monstrous aberration.' Pretty good eh?" "Swell!" I agreed. "About Hitler, Eh?" "You certainly hit the nail on the head!" said Seryozha bursting out laughing. "That's Maupassant, brother, 'The Sundays of a Parisian'!" Somewhat embarrassed, I laughed too. "Not so long ago I gave a talk on Hitlerism," said Seryozha. "I was asked why Hitler is burning the classics. I answered that fascism was the enemy of culture in general and so on. But what I should have done was read this page from Maupassant. It would have answered the purpose better. Pity I didn't get hold of this book before. This is one straight in the eye for crazy Adolf. There isn't a single classic in which he can't find a crack at himself. That's why he got so raving ad and gave orders to burn them all. Freaks don't keep mirrors in their houses. A mirror reminds them of their freakishness and only irritates them." Then Seryozha took out his notebook and copied the quotation. Feeling extremely pleased with himself he began to walk around the room whistling an aria from "Carmen." [ ... ] Seryozha has summed up the work of the crew. We have 160 opera- tional flights to our credit. We've done 180,000 kilometres over enemy territory and dropped more than 200 tons of bombs on various targets. We took a hand in defending Moscow, saw action on the Kharkov and Voronezh Fronts and around Leningrad and Stalingrad. We've flown to Germany and to Hitler's vassal countries. I must say that the "itinerary" of our crew looks quite impressive. "We've done what we could," said Sergei. "Wish to God that every- one could do the same. And I hope that before the end of the war we'll still manage to add something or other to our score. Right, Sasha?" "Right," said I. "If only we're alive we certainly will." From A. Molodchy, "180,000 Kilometres over Enemy Territory," in An Army of Heroes, True Stories of Soviet Fighting Men, translated from the Russian by Elizabeth Donnelly, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1944.