Monumental Propaganda Read Free Page A

tongue or an act of sabotage? He had not even finished thinking his thought when Aglaya declared the monument open and handed him a large pair of shears like the ones used for clipping sheep. Kuzhelnikov took the shears without removing his gloves, brought the blades together and the ends of the string flew apart, fluttering in the wind. The cover was pulled off with great difficulty, because it had inflated like a parachute and kept tearing itself out of their hands. But when they did finally manage to subdue it, the participants in the event took a few short steps backward, looked up at the monument, gasped in a single breath and froze on the spot.
    None of these people, except for Ogorodov and Zinaida, had the slightest idea about any kind of art, especially about sculpture, but even they could see that they had before them not simply a statue but something quite extraordinary. Stalin was sculpted in full dress uniform with the shoulder straps of a generalissimo, his uniform coat parted slightly to reveal his military jacket and decorations, with his right hand quite obviously raised in greeting to the masses of the people as they passed by, and his left hand lowered, clutching his gloves.
    Stalin looked at the people gathered there as though he were alive. He gazed down on them, grinning mysteriously into his mustache, and everyone thought they saw him actually wave his right hand and move his left, smacking the gloves against his knee.
    At first Max Ogorodov couldn’t believe his own eyes, and when he did, he opened his mouth wide and froze with an expression on his face that can only be called idiotic, as if he himself had been instantly transformed into cast iron.
    In recent years he had sculpted Stalin, only Stalin and nobody but Stalin, but he had sculpted every possible aspect of him: Stalin’s head, Stalin’s bust, Stalin full length, Stalin standing and sitting (lying was the only position he hadn’t sculpted), in a field jacket, in a high-collared tunic, in a long-skirted cavalry greatcoat and in the uniform of a generalissimo. He had eventually grown so skillful at his work that he could fashion Iosif Vissarionovich with his own eyes closed.
    The authorities had given him their seal of approval as a truly fine artist who had completely mastered the method of socialist realism. They valued him and held him up as an example to others, encouraging and supporting him by moral, material and combined means, rewarding him with positions, decorations, bonuses, adulatory articles in the newspapers, the inclusion of his name in the encyclopedia, in the lists of the great modern masters and the lists of recipients of various food products that were in short supply. But his colleagues regarded him as a confirmed second-rater, a cold mechanical artisan, even a hack, and in general whenever his name came up, they said, “Oh him!” And they would gesture dismissively, never suspecting that he had any divine spark in him and thinking that he knew his own worth well enough, and was only concerned to tend his own petty affairs without hankering after an exalted position in art. And that was their big mistake. In actual fact, while well aware that he produced rubbish, the sculptor Ogorodov did hanker after an exalted position, perhaps even one on Mount Olympus itself, and every time he fashioned yet another Stalin he didn’t just churn it out, he strove to create, weaving spells and performing entire religious rites. Each time, he made slight changes to the bearing, the inclination of the head, the narrowing of the eyes and the pressure of the closed lips. As he added the final touches, he would run a long way back, then run up close, sometimes shutting his eyes and making a dent somewhere on a sudden intuition, squeezing up, drawing in and retouching with his fingernail in the insane hope that a miracle would occur through some chance accident. Then he would run away and back again and breathe on his