Monumental Propaganda Read Free Page B

creation through his hands folded into a tube—perhaps it might have seemed funny to an outsider, but he was trying to breathe a soul into his creation! But yet again the creation would turn out lifeless—it had no mystery, no wonder. Ogorodov suffered, sometimes he even wept, tugging at his sparse hair, hammering his fists against his head and calling himself a talentless hack, but he was wrong: a talentless hack is a man who is unaware of his own lack of talent.
    While this sculpture was in the studio, Ogorodov had thought that it too was ordinary, but now, elevated on its pedestal (so that was what had been lacking!), it had come to life and gazed down in mocking triumph on all of them and its own creator with an expression that seemed somehow insolent, even suggesting that it had created itself.
    â€œMy God! My God!” muttered the astounded creator, his eyes fixed on the statue. But it’s alive, really alive, isn’t it? he asked himself, amazed that he hadn’t noticed it before.
    â€œCalm down!” Zinaida told her husband quietly but firmly, sticking a coarse cigarette with an icicle dangling from its frozen cardboard tube into her mouth.
    â€œNo,” said Ogorodov, without making it clear what he was rejecting, then he reached out his arms to his creation and shouted: “Hey!” And then again: “Hey! Hey!”
    â€œWho are you yelling at?” Kuzhelnikov asked in arrogant amazement.
    â€œNot you,” said Ogorodov, dismissing the other’s elevated rank out of hand. And he called out again: “Hey! Hey! Hey!”
    Astounded, the people standing beside Ogorodov drew away from him just in case he might be crazy, and he stepped toward the monument with his arms raised aloft in passion and shouted to it: “Hey, say something!”
    Of course, he was not the first sculptor to address such a request to his own work. Long before his time the great Michelangelo had asked the same thing of the Moses he had created. But the people gathered in the square, unsuspecting of any plagiarism, exchanged glances, some of them in fact suspecting—respectfully, of course—that perhaps the sculptor was not quite all there: after all, he was an artist. However, the poet Serafim Butylko approached his brother in art, clapped him on the shoulder and, breathing out fumes of stale alcohol, garlic and rotten teeth, said in a respectful tone: “That’s right, he is almost alive.”
    â€œNonsense!” the sculptor protested in a whisper. “What do you mean, ‘almost’? He isn’t almost alive—he is alive. Just look, he’s watching, he’s breathing and there’s steam coming out of his mouth!”
    This was a quite absurd assertion. The iron lips of the sculpture were clamped firmly shut; there was no steam emerging from between them. And there could not be. Perhaps there might just have been a chance eddy of snow in some surface irregularities. But be that as it may, not only the sculptor but everyone else thought they really did see something swirling in the air beneath the iron mustache.
    While Ogorodov shouted incoherently, his wife Zinaida was once again chewing on her extinguished cigarette as she contemplated her immediate future. She had doggedly promoted Ogorodov’s career, fore-seeing even as she did so that if he should really become famous and fashionable, he would be swamped by predatory young female admirers and in the subsequent havoc the position of the faded wife would immediately become untenable. But Ogorodov failed to notice his wife’s emotional turmoil: he tugged off his beret, threw it under his feet and with a cry of “I have vindicated my life!” began trampling the poor rag as furiously as if it were to blame for his not having vindicated his life sooner. “Vindicated, vindicated, vindicated my life!” he carried on bellowing, not understanding that life is given to us just as it is,