Friday, January 02, 2009

More Bunin

Hassled with other stuff today, so for filler her is another snippet from the Revolution diary of Ivan Bunin:
...on the square next to the Duma the rostrums of the First of May still assault the eyes with their red color. Farther on, something incomprehensibly foul, enigmatic, and complex rises high in the distance. This something, held together by boards and apparently conforming to some Futurist design, is daubed with paint in every possible way. It is an entire edifice, narrowing at the top and graced with gates all round. Posters again hang all along Deribasovskaya Street: two workers are turning a press, under which lies a flattened bourgeois. Golden coins pour forth in ribbons form his mouth and ass. And the mob walking about? First of all, how filthy they are! How many old, unbelievably soiled soldiers' overcoats, how many reddish brown leg-wrappings on their feet, how many greasy caps on their lice-ridden heads--all looking as though theyhad been used to sweep up the street! And I'm seized with horror when I think about how many people are going about in clothes, stripped from the corpses, of those who have already been murdered!

-- Ivan Bunin, Cursed Days: A Diary of Revolution 131
(Thomas Gaiton Marullo trans. 1998; originally published in Russian in 1936)
That's from an entry for April 25/May 8, 1919; it apparently summarizes the events of several days.

No comments: