Children...............
On Vladivostok And Other Doubts
“I can’t write dialogue; conservational language is completely unnatural, I mean rhythmically it’s absurd. The thought of a grown man contemplating the weather while his own brother mourns their mother’s death not only disgusts my moral fibre but my humanist convictions! How would one’s public react to such a conclusion, how would they cope?”
“In all honesty my friend I doubt the public are too concerned with your esteemed lack of humility. You hold yourself to such high standards it’s unthinkable that they would reject a drama of such Tolstoyan proportions. How often is it that a man tries to capture the essence of the monotonous despair experienced daily throughout Vladivostok and her treacherous climes?”
“Somehow I do not think that it would be a regular occurrence.”
“Then why do you labour yourself with such inelegant doubts? Has it not occurred to you that we are all free to release our musings, no matter how ill conceived or downright tempestuous unto the unsuspecting masses?”
“Of course it has occurred to me. Man himself is oft unwilling to spare the public even his most fleeting of notions. Sartre’s unfounded tenacity and irritably inquisitive nature spawned a bestseller, a philosophical meandering outselling the greatest fiction of the era! How ironically suspect, how inadequately obtuse!”
“Surely you don’t see the need to belittle others so profusely. Was it not I who saw talent within a bourgeois layabout, who idly expected the local harlot to cleanse his soul from figurative sin? Did I not convince the Muscovite Jewry to publish and promote your debut correspondence with Chekhov himself? Or have we forgotten our rather leniently exposed beginnings?”
“Of course I have not forgotten! To forget is to deny! An admittedly subconscious convenience humanity manipulates all too often. For are we not beyond these reactionary statements or have you finally been graciously ingratiated into “Comrade” Trotsky’s revolutionary clique?”
“I have neither deal nor business with the Mensheviks my friend other than the fact that Leon is indeed a nephew of mine. Many winters ago I would tend to my sister’s holdings in the Ukraine as a favour to his father. In many ways I was in his debt, we shared the same menial existence of the Germanic underclass, toiling pestilent farrows with remedial ploughs. Although now that you know this would you still claim my apparent fraternisation with Trotsky as anything less than innocent?”
“No my friend, how could I? Your grace is infallible, unparalleled in charm. A man who shares his truth with his comrade need not fear retribution, intangible or otherwise! However my original suggestion is left unattended to! Tell me brother how would you address this petulant tangent?”
“Мы не должны интересоваться этим пока! We needn’t concern ourselves with this for now!”