THE HURDY-GURDY

A Play in Three Acts, Six Scenes

CHARACTERS

IGNAT NIKANOROVICH SHCHOEV, the director of a network of rural cooperatives in a remote district

YEVSEI, his assistant

PYOTR OPORNYKH, a procurement agent for the cooperative

KLOKOTOV, a procurement agent for the cooperative

GODOVALOV, a representative of the cooperative’s members, member of the cooperative’s supervisory committee

YEVDOKIA, a newly promoted member of the proletariat¹

FIRST FEMALE OFFICE WORKER

FIRST MALE OFFICE WORKER

ALYOSHA, a wandering cultural worker with music

MIUD,² an adolescent maiden, Alyosha’s companion in their common work

KUZMA, an iron man, Alyosha’s and Miud’s sideshow

EDUARD-VALKYRIYA-HANSEN STERVETSEN, a Danish professor and food industry expert, in the USSR with the goal of acquiring its “shock-working soul” for western Europe³

SERENA, his daughter, a young girl

A TALKING TUBE on SHCHOEV’s desk

AN AGENT OF A STATE COLLECTIVE FARM

AN ALIEN PERSON

FOUR AIR-CHEM DEFENSE GIRLS4

A FIREMAN

A POLICEMAN

A LOCAL POSTMAN

OTHERS: children’s faces looking in the office window; two workers on a demolition crew; several office workers, men and women; people from the cooperativized population; people standing in line outside the Park of Culture and Leisure; two or three passing construction workers; workers in the shop by the doors of the cooperative

ACT 1

Scene 1

Outskirts of a district town. A road leading into distant parts. An occasional wind stirs the trees to either side of it. On the left, amid the emptiness of the horizon, stands a construction site. On the right can be seen a small town. Above the town are flags. On the edge of the town stands a large barnlike dwelling with a flag above it. The flag shows a cooperative handshake, which can be made out from a distance.⁵

Wind. No sign of life. The distant flags flutter. Above the earth—the sun and a vast summer day. At first, except for the wind, everything is still. Then come sounds of moving iron. Some unknown iron heaviness is moving along—very slowly indeed, judging by the sounds. A girlish voice wearily sings a quiet song. The song and the iron approach together.

A mechanical individual—an iron man, to be referred to as KUZMA—appears onstage. KUZMA is a metal, wind-up construction in the shape of someone short and stocky, self-importantly stepping forward and clanking his mouth all the while, as if taking breaths. ALYOSHA—a young man in a straw hat, with the face of a wanderer—leads KUZMA by the hand, rotating it on its axis like a wheel or a regulator. With them appears MIUD—an adolescent girl. She speaks and carries herself with trust and clarity; she has not known oppression. On his back ALYOSHA carries a hurdy-gurdy. The threesome appear to be strolling musicians, with KUZMA as their special attraction.6 KUZMA suddenly stops and clanks his jaw, as if wanting a drink. The group stand still amid an empty, radiant world.⁷

MIUD: Alyosha, I’ve gotten bored of living in the world.

ALYOSHA: Never mind. Soon there will be socialism—then everyone will rejoice.

MIUD: Me too?

ALYOSHA: Yes, you too.

MIUD: But what if my heart starts to ache for some reason?

ALYOSHA: Doesn’t matter. It will be cut out of you, to save it from torment.

Pause. MIUD hums a tune without words. ALYOSHA examines the space around him.

MIUD (moving from a hum into song):

Along the merry path of labor

Shoeless we plod on our bare feet.

We’re nearly there, not far to go;

Our happy home’s already built.

Alyosha, I’ve been thinking—and it’s like this: my heart aches because I’ve lost touch with the masses.

ALYOSHA: You live unscientifically. That’s why something’s always aching inside you—first one thing, then another. As soon as socialism sets in, I will invent you all over again, from square one—and you will be the child of the whole international proletariat.

MIUD: All right. Because, you know, I was born under capitalism. For two years I knew only suffering. (She turns to KUZMA, touching him with her hands. MIUD always touches the people and objects with whom she enters into relationship.) Kuzma, tell me something that’s smarter than smart!

Kuzma chomps his human-looking jaws. ALYOSHA adjusts some mechanism in KUZMA’s cuffs and holds his hand.

MIUD: Come on, Kuzma!

KUZMA (in an indifferent wooden voice, in which can always be heard the grating of cogs and wheels): Opportunist…

MIUD (listening attentively): And what else?

KUZMA: Unscrupulous and grasping self-server…Un-principledness…Rightist-leftist element…Backwardness…You need someone at your head!

MIUD: And what else am I?

Alyosha manipulates something in KUZMA’s hand.

KUZMA: You are a class wonder…You are a special young sprout…You are the shock worker of the poor peasants’ joy. Already we…

MIUD (quickly): I know, I know. We have already stepped into the foundation, we already have both feet inside it. (Moves about and does a little dance.)8 Wholly and entirely, we’re simply something very special indeed!

KUZMA: We, the advancing mass, now press on forward! (Random, indecipherable sounds then issue from Kuzma.)

MIUD (to KUZMA): I love you, Kuzma! You, after all, are only poor iron! You look so important, but your heart is broken down, and you were thought up by Alyosha! After all, you’re not really a proper being, only a middling something!

KUZMA is silent and doesn’t clank his mouth. A locomotive whistles in the distance.

ALYOSHA: Let’s go, Miud. Soon it will be evening. Gloom will descend on the earth, and we need to eat and find somewhere to spend the night.

MIUD: Alyosha, all my ideas ache with hunger! (She touches her chest.)

ALYOSHA (touches MIUD): Where?

MIUD: There, Alyosha, where I sometimes feel fine, and sometimes not.

ALYOSHA: Sabotage on the part of Nature, Miud.

MIUD: Is Nature a Fascist?

ALYOSHA: What did you think she was?

MIUD: I thought she must be a Fascist too. All of a sudden the sun goes out. Or the rain—sometimes it drips, sometimes it doesn’t. Isn’t that right? We need a Bolshevik Nature, the way spring was—isn’t that true? And what’s this (points toward the locality)? Nothing but a den of subkulaks. There’s not the least principle of the Plan here!

KUZMA growls indistinctly. ALYOSHA regulates him, and he falls silent. Briefly, a locomotive whistles nearby.

ALYOSHA: Let this place shine for a little longer. (Looks around him.) Soon we’ll liquidate it too, like a well-off ghost. We didn’t construct it, so why does it exist?

MIUD: The sooner, the better, Alyosha. Waiting is boring.

The sound of people’s footsteps.

KUZMA (muttering): Failure to respond to activism.

MIUD: What’s he saying?

ALYOSHA: It’s his remaining words—they’re stuck in his throat. (Regulates KUZMA on the back of his neck.)

Two or three construction workers walk up, carrying small chests, saws, and—in the hands of the foremost—a flag.

MIUD: And who are you? Shock workers, or not?

FIRST WORKER: That’s us, young lady. That’s who we are.

MIUD: And we are cultural workers. Our kolkhoz reading hut has sent us here.9

OTHER WORKER: So you’re beggars, is that it?

MIUD: Alyosha, he is the idiotism of village life.¹⁰

KUZMA (first growls something, then speaks): Live quietly…Sow hemp and castor-oil plants…¹¹ (Drones on and falls silent: the rasping of an inner mechanism is audible.)

FIRST WORKER: Play us something, lad. Entrance us.

ALYOSHA: Just a minute (winds KUZMA up from behind).

MIUD: Put a five-kopek piece in Kuzma (shows them where to put it—in his mouth). It goes toward cultural work with uncollectivized peasant households. You love peasant households, don’t you?

One of the construction workers puts a five-kopek piece in KUZMA’s mouth. KUZMA’s jaw begins to chew. ALYOSHA takes KUZMA by the hand and sets up the hurdy-gurdy. KUZMA begins to grate out something unintelligible. ALYOSHA begins to play an old-fashioned tune on the hurdy-gurdy. KUZMA sings out more distinctly.

MIUD (sings along with KUZMA):

To the u-ni-ver-sal pro-le-ta-ri-an,

To the holder of power,

Glory!

To the sub-ku-lak hi-re-ling, to extremists, to eulogizers of the status quo,

To double-dealers and those without principles,

To the right and the left deviationist, to every dark force—

Shame everlasting!

KUZMA (after the song, to himself):…It’s warmer in a hut than in socialism…

OTHER WORKER (after hearing the song through): Sell us this ironclad opportunist!

ALYOSHA: This old Kuzya? What are you saying? We ourselves hold him dear. Anyway, what do you want him for?

OTHER WORKER: Well, for comfort. God, in his day, got himself a devil. We’ll do the same. We’ll get ourselves a pet opportunist!

FIRST WORKER (to ALYOSHA): Here, mate, here’s a ruble for your invention. Get yourself something to eat, or your head will grow weak.

ALYOSHA: No thanks. But you should lower the fee you charge for construction—then I’ll sense your ruble everywhere.

MIUD: We don’t take money for ourselves. We love our Soviet currency and we want it to be strong.

KUZMA: R-r-reptile-h-h-heroes…Live little by little.

ALYOSHA (regulates KUZMA, and he falls silent): Counterrevolutionary slogans of one kind or another are always storming within him. Either he’s sick or he’s broken.

MIUD (to the construction workers): All right, you lot, the Five-Year Plan’s on the go. You get going too!

FIRST WORKER: This is some young lady! Whoever could have been her mama?

OTHER WORKER (insightfully): Social stuff of some kind.

The construction workers walk away.

Behind the wall—indefinite foreign sounds.

MIUD: Let’s go, Alyosha. I want something to fill me up.

ALYOSHA (puts KUZMA in order): In a moment. What is it with you, little toadlet? You’re always suffering. It’s time you got used to it.

MIUD: All right. I do like getting used to things, Alyosha.

STERVETSEN and his daughter SERENA appear.12 She is a young European, with a somewhat Mongolian face and an elegant revolver at her hip. Both wear traveling coats and are carrying suitcases. They bow and greet ALYOSHA, MIUD, and also KUZMA. In response KUZMA slowly offers his hand to STERVETSEN and SERENA. The foreigners speak in Russian; the degree to which they distort the language is up to the individual actors.

STERVETSEN: Greetings, comrade activists.

SERENA: We want to be with you. We love your whole bitter fate!

MIUD: Liar, we don’t have fate here anymore. We have summer here now, the birds are singing, and what we’ve got under construction here is quite something! (To ALYOSHA, in a different, peaceable tone) Alyosha, what is she?

ALYOSHA: One of the well-off, I guess.

KUZMA: R-r-reptiles…

ALYOSHA restrains KUZMA.

MIUD (to the foreigners): So, what are you?

STERVETSEN: We…are now a propertyless spirit, which has been dekulakized.13

SERENA: We were reading, and transduced for us was…Papa, información?

STERVETSEN: A terse conversing, Seren.

SERENA: A conversing, in which they said you have taken the bourgeoisie, and also the half class, and even the stronger class, and sent them all tersely to hell.

MIUD: She is good, Alyosha. We sent them to hell, and that’s where they’ve come from—and she talks so clearly.

STERVETSEN: I was young, and I visited Russia long ago to exist. I lived here in the nineteenth century in a factory that made little peppermint buns. Now I can see a town—but back then only rare, occasional people were to be found here, and I wept among them on foot…Yes, Seren!

SERENA: What, Papa? Who are these people—the hired hands of the avant-garde?

MIUD: You’re a stupid little bourgeoise! We are the generation—that’s who we are!

STERVETSEN: They are a good and kind enterprise, Seren!

ALYOSHA: And what do you need here among our class?

STERVETSEN: We need your celestial joy of terrestrial labor.

ALYOSHA: What kind of joy?

STERVETSEN: Here you have a shock-working psyche. Enthusiasm is visibly located on every citizen’s face.

MIUD: And what business of yours is it if we’re joyful?

STERVETSEN: Here you have organized a state silence and over it stands…a tower of the superstretched soul.

MIUD: You mean the superstructure! You don’t even know what to call it—we have surpassed you!

STERVETSEN: The superstructure! The spirit of motion in the citizens’ heart of hearts. The warmth above the icy landscape of your poverty! The superstructure!!! We want to purchase it here in your tsardom or swap it for our precise and sorrowful science. In Europe we have a fair amount of the lower stuff, but the flame on the tower has gone out. The wind cries straight into our bored heart—and above it stands no superstructure of inspiring fervor…Our heart is no shock worker…It is…how do you say it?…it is a soft-spoken fly-by-night…

SERENA: Papa, tell them that I…

KUZMA: Unscrupulous and grasping self-server! The strength of an element.

SERENA (looking at KUZMA): He knows everything, like a comrade guide.

MIUD: Our Kuzya? But he is an element under our guidance!

STERVETSEN: Where around here is it permitted to purchase the superstructure? (Points to the town) There? We will give a lot of foreign currency. We will allocate you, maybe, a loan of diamonds, or ships of Canadian wheat, our Danish cream, two aircraft carriers, the Mongolian beauty of ripened women—we are ready to open our eternal safes to you…And you—just give us the gift of your superstructure! What do you need it for? You have the base, after all—so you can live for the time being on the foundation.

KUZMA (growls threateningly): The cunning of the class enemy…The Roman Catholic Pope…

ALYOSHA (cutting KUZMA short): Aha. You want to shut down our ashpan and our blower pipe. So we stop dead in our tracks!

MIUD (whispering to ALYOSHA): Fascists! Don’t sell our superstructure—we can climb up on it ourselves!

ALYOSHA: I won’t.

SERENA: We were given an understanding of this question. They have Party lines laid down for them. Buy Europe a Party guideline. They’re not ready to part with their superstructure.

STERVETSEN: Sell us a Party line! I’ll give you dollars!

MIUD: All we have is a single directive—and only a little one at that.

SERENA: Buy this directive, Papa. You can buy the superstructure of extremism later, somewhere far away.

ALYOSHA: We don’t sell our directives for Fascist money.

MIUD (touches the revolver on SERENA’s hip): Give it to me. We’re having a cultural revolution here—and you walk around with a pistol. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?

SERENA (in bewilderment): Do you need it badly?

MIUD: Of course I do. After all, you’re not having a cultural revolution. You’re benighted, evil people, and we have a right to your Nagant revolvers.14

SERENA: Take it (hands over the revolver).

MIUD: Thank you, girl (immediately kisses SERENA’s cheek). When someone yields to us, we forgive them everything.¹⁵

SERENA: Papa, the Oonion Soviet is very nice. (To ALYOSHA) Play us a fox-trot!

ALYOSHA: No Soviet mechanism would dare.¹⁶

STERVETSEN and SERENA bow and exit.

MIUD: But Alyosha, how will they purchase an idea, when it’s inside our whole body? Having it extracted is going to be painful.

ALYOSHA: Don’t worry, Miud. I will sell them…Kuzma. He is, after all, an idea. And he’ll be the death of the bourgeoisie.

MIUD: I’ll be sorry to part with Kuzma.

KUZMA: Backwardness…Live in fear of capitalism…

ALYOSHA: No need to miss him, Miud. We’ll order ourselves another. In any case, Kuzma’s already fallen somewhat behind the masses.

He winds up KUZMA. KUZMA begins to step forward with a grinding sound from inside him, muttering something unintelligible with his steel lips. All three exit. Offstage, no longer visible, they sing a few words of a song. ALYOSHA and MIUD stop singing, but KUZMA, as he moves further away, continues to drone on alone in his cast-iron voice: “Eh-eh-eh-eh…”

Scene 2

A government office—something between a bathhouse, a beer joint, and a barrack. Smoke, noise, and a crush of office workers. Two toilets, and two doors that open into them. The toilet doors open and close; employees of various sexes are using the toilets. SHCHOEV is sitting behind an enormous desk. On the desk is a trumpet-shaped megaphone that he uses to converse with the whole town and the cooperatives: the town is not large and the megaphone can be heard throughout its confines.

SHCHOEV (to the whole office, which is seething with clerical production): Let me think a minute. You there, cut out those stomach odors that are drifting over to me. (The toilet doors stop opening and closing. A general silence. SHCHOEV falls into thought. His stomach begins to growl; the growling gets louder. Then, quietly) The requirements of the distribution system make me ache all over. (Strokes his stomach) The moment I fall into thought, my stomach starts rumbling. That means all the elements are grieving within me…(Into the mass of employees) Yevsei!

YEVSEI (from somewhere out of sight): Right away, Ignat Nikanorovich. I’ll just total up the cabbages and pickled cucumber—and then I’ll appear before you.

SHCHOEV: Add them up on the double, without leaving your post. I’ll iron out your figures myself, later. Now answer in detail: what do we have today for the non-dues-paying members of our cooperative?17

YEVSEI (still out of sight): Glue!

SHCHOEV: Fine. And tomorrow?

YEVSEI: A first-grade reader, Ignat Nikanorovich.

SHCHOEV: And yesterday?

YEVSEI: Fly-killing powder, Zverev’s system, a half package per person.

SHCHOEV: Is it wise, Yevsei, to be killing flies with powder?

YEVSEI: Whyever not, Ignat Nikanorovich? After all, we have yet to receive any Party line for the procurement of flies.18 And the salvage yard is still refusing to accept insects.

SHCHOEV: That’s not what I mean—don’t interrupt me when I’m thinking…I’m asking, what about the pigeon birds or other flying ephemera? What are they going to eat once you knock down all the flies? After all, things that fly are also food products.

YEVSEI: No flying ephemera are expected this year, Ignat Nikanorovich. The cooperatives of the southern district intercepted and procured them ahead of us. This spring, Ignat Nikanorovich, we are expecting an empty sky. And with no birds, the flies will run wild.

SHCHOEV: Ah well, leave it be, then. Let them stuff themselves with flying ephemera. Telegraph the regional office for me and check whether Party lines are being stolen in our district…Ten days without even one circular—it’s terrifying! I see no guiding line beneath my feet.

In the yard outside the office the hurdy-gurdy plays an old waltz. The office turns its ears to the sound. So does SHCHOEV.

YEVSEI (still unseen): How about a coin for the musician, Ignat Nikanorovich? A cultural worker is, after all, a human being!

SHCHOEV: I’ll coin you a coin or two! You’re a fine one—squandering the money of others! Our financial plan is unfulfilled—and here you go tossing our resources out the window! You go and get a contribution for our zeppelin out of him—that’s what you should be doing now!19

YEVSEI appears briefly, standing up from within the mass of employees, then goes away. The hurdy-gurdy plays on without interruption. The TALKING TUBE on SHCHOEV’s desk begins to whistle and hum. The hurdy-gurdy falls silent.

SHCHOEV (into the TUBE): Alla!²⁰ Who? Speak up, it’s me—who else!

These words, spoken into the TUBE, are then repeated, three times as loud, somewhere beyond the office walls. The echo resounds in the surrounding spaces, the emptiness of which is felt in the length and boredom of the repeatedly reverberating sounds. All conversation via the TUBE is to be carried out in this manner; this stage direction will not be repeated on every subsequent occasion.

A DISTANT VOICE (from outside the office): The little mushrooms, Ignat Nikanorovich, are beginning to go wormy. If you please, let the shop employees eat them—or else distribute them to the working mass!

The TUBE on the desk repeats these same words a few seconds later in an entirely different voice—one that is more muffled, with a different expression and even a different meaning.

SHCHOEV (into the TUBE): What mushrooms?

DISTANT VOICE (offstage): Year-old mushrooms, salted, soaked, and dried…

SHCHOEV (not into the TUBE): Yevsei!

OFFICE WORKERS: Ignat Nikanorovich, Yevsei has gone out to conduct a fund-raising campaign.

SHCHOEV: Labor on in silence. I’ve remembered.

The hurdy-gurdy plays a new tune. YEVSEI enters with someone else’s straw hat in his hands. It is full of copper coins. He pours them onto SHCHOEV’s desk. The hurdy-gurdy falls silent.

YEVSEI: He gave twenty rubles. Later, he says, he’ll bring more. The zeppelin, he says, fills me with joy. Too bad, he says, I didn’t hear about it earlier, or, he says, I’d have invented a Soviet airship myself.

SHCHOEV: What is he—some kind of enthusiast for every kind of construction?

YEVSEI: Seems like it, Ignat Nikanorovich.

SHCHOEV: Member of something, or not?

YEVSEI: He says he’s not a member of anything.

SHCHOEV: How come? That’s strange…(Pause. The hurdy-gurdy is playing far away, barely audible.) Never in my life have I seen a true enthusiast. Ten thousand members I unite, and they’re all like animals—day and night, all they want to do is eat. Go and bring him here—for my observation. (The TUBE on the desk growls something. He looks at the TUBE, then continues, to Yevsei) Is this your doing? You’ve been tormenting these mushrooms for over a year now!

YEVSEI: They’re not mushrooms, Ignat Nikanorovich. It’s soy in the guise of mushrooms—I ordered it to be marinated. What’s the hurry, Ignat Nikanorovich? People can eat anything—but where does it get us? We’ll be better off with a bit more materialism—there are enough people around as it is.

SHCHOEV (pensively): You’re right—one hundred percent and then some! (Into the TUBE) Don’t touch the mushrooms, you locusts from hell. Let them lie there as reserve supplies!

The hurdy-gurdy plays still further away.

(To YEVSEI) Call the music in here. I want a mood!

Exit Yevsei.

(To the office workers) Give me some papers to sign. Somehow the world has turned boring.

FIRST MALE OFFICE WORKER (standing up from among the rows of desks): We’ve got some confirmations and reminders lying around over here, Ignat Nikanorovich.

SHCHOEV: Hand over whatever you’ve got.

The worker brings a sheaf of papers over to SHCHOEV’s desk.

(Takes a seal from his pocket and hands it to the worker) Go on then!

The worker blows on the seal and stamps the papers.

(Sitting idle) We need to direct some kind of directive at the shops on our periphery.

FIRST MALE OFFICE WORKER: I’ll do just that, Ignat Nikanorovich.

SHCHOEV: Please do.

Enter YEVSEI. Behind him—ALYOSHA with the hurdy-gurdy. MIUD attempts to lead KUZMA in by the hand, but his torso is unable to get through the narrow space of the entrance.

MIUD: Alyosha, Kuzya’s misfitting. There’s a bottleneck.21

ALYOSHA: Let him stick around outside then.

KUZMA (in the doorway): Don’t touch old-timer capitalism…R-r-reptiles…(remains outside the office).

SHCHOEV: And who are you?

ALYOSHA: We’re strolling Bolsheviks.

SHCHOEV: And where are you strolling now?

ALYOSHA (with profound sincerity): We’re going by way of collective farms and construction sites—to socialism!

SHCHOEV: To where?

MIUD (childishly sincere): To socialism!

SHCHOEV (pensively): A fine, faraway district.

MIUD: Yes, that’s right, far away. But we’ll get there all the same.

SHCHOEV: Yevsei, give this girl a candy.

ALYOSHA (embracing MIUD): No, don’t. She’s not used to sweets.

MIUD: Suck the candy yourself, you sweet-toothed egotist.

SHCHOEV (comes out from behind his desk, toward people): Dear comrades, laborers, consumers, members, pedestrian foot walkers, and Bolsheviks—I love you all most remarkably!

YEVSEI (to MIUD): And you, young lady, how do you like your candy—filled with jam, or with cherry juice?

MIUD: Let the proletariat bring me treats—not you. You don’t have a class face.

SHCHOEV: I do love this generation, Yevsei. And you?

YEVSEI: Well, Ignat Nikanorovich, one simply has to love them!

ALYOSHA (not understanding the situation): So are you building socialism here?

SHCHOEV: And how!

YEVSEI: All the way!

ALYOSHA: Can we help build too? Playing music all the time—it makes your heart ache.

MIUD (touching ALYOSHA): And I’ve got bored of living in the world on foot.

SHCHOEV: But why do you want to build? You are the springtime of our class, and spring must blossom. Keep playing your music. What do you think, Yevsei?

YEVSEI: Yes, I reckon, Ignat Nikanorovich, that we will manage just fine without minors. Once everything’s ready, they can come and feast themselves!

MIUD: But we want to help build.

SHCHOEV: But can you organize the masses?

ALYOSHA and MIUD are silent for a while.

ALYOSHA: All I can do is invent a zeppelin.

Pause.

SHCHOEV: Well, there we are. And you say you want to help. You’d do better to stay in our multistore system as musical reinforcement. You will give comfort to the leadership. Yevsei, do our staff regulations provide for the employment of comforters?

YEVSEI: I reckon, Ignat Nikanorovich, that no objections will arise. Let them comfort away.

SHCHOEV (thinking this over deeply): Excellent. In that case, Yevsei, let’s enroll these wanderers. Let them stop here. (To ALYOSHA) Play me something tender.

ALYOSHA takes his hurdy-gurdy and plays a sorrowful folk melody. SHCHOEV, YEVSEI, and the entire office are in a deep pause. The institution stands idle. Everyone is lost in thought. ALYOSHA changes registers and plays a different piece.

MIUD (gradually and imperceptibly joins in the melody and begins to sing softly):

They set off on foot

For a faraway land,

Leaving their motherland

For a freedom unknown.

Strangers to everyone,

No comrade but the wind—

In their breast their heart

Beats without reply.

ALYOSHA goes on playing a little while after MIUD has fallen silent. In the course of the music and MIUD’s song, SHCHOEV has been gradually slumping over his desk, weeping in quiet anguish. YEVSEI has been looking at SHCHOEV and contorting his features with suffering in a similar way—but tears cannot flow from his eyes. The office weeps in silence. Pause.

SHCHOEV: Somehow it’s all so pitiful, damn it. Come on, Yevsei, let’s organize the masses.

YEVSEI: Then there won’t be enough vegetables for them, Ignat Nikanorovich.

SHCHOEV: Oh, Yevsei, let’s believe in something! (Wipes away his tears. Then, to ALYOSHA) Know what you should be inventing instead of zeppelins? How best to dry up the tears of crybabies!

ALYOSHA: I can do that.

SHCHOEV: Enroll him then, Yevsei, in our permanent staff: as comforter of the masses. Get the approval of the proper authorities. It’s time we procured some masses to work in our apparatus.

YEVSEI: Do we have to, Ignat Nikanorovich? We’ve already had one promoted proletarian dumped on us—Yevdokia!

ALYOSHA quietly plays a dance tune on the hurdy-gurdy. MIUD moves lightly through the steps.

SHCHOEV: And what is Yevdokia doing now?

YEVSEI: Nothing, Ignat Nikanorovich. She’s a woman.

SHCHOEV: So what if she’s a woman? There’s something unknown in her too.

YEVSEI: There’s milk in her, Ignat Nikanorovich.

SHCHOEV: Ah! Then she can play a leading role in the milk and butter sector of our apparatus.

YEVSEI: So she can, Ignat Nikanorovich.

ALYOSHA plays the same dance a little more loudly. Still sitting, not rising from their places, the office staff move their torsos in time to the dance. The TUBE on SHCHOEV’s desk begins to growl.

SHCHOEV (into the TUBE): Alla! It’s me!

TUBE: Birds, Ignat Nikanorovich, are flying over our district.

SHCHOEV (into the TUBE): Where from?

TUBE: From parts unknown. From foreign states.

SHCHOEV: How many?

TUBE: Three.

SHCHOEV: Catch them!

TUBE: Right away.

Noise of wind over the office. Bird cries.

SHCHOEV: What is all this?

YEVSEI: This, Ignat Nikanorovich, is the beginning of a new quarter or, by the old calendar, the beginning of spring.

SHCHOEV (pensively): Spring. A good Bolshevik epoch!

YEVSEI: A tolerable one, Ignat Nikanorovich.

MIUD: It’s not spring now. Spring ended long ago. It’s summer now—the season for construction.

SHCHOEV: What do you mean, summer?

YEVSEI: It makes no difference, Ignat Nikanorovich. It’s only the weather that changes, the time remains the same.

SHCHOEV: You’re right, Yevsei.

Enter PYOTR OPORNYKH. In his hands are a chicken and two pigeons.

OPORNYKH: Here’s a whatchamacallit! I, Ignat Nikanorovich, have now procured you some fowl: one propertyless hen and two pigeons to boot.

MIUD: In spring only strange birds fly in—not chickens. All chickens are kolkhoz members.

ALYOSHA (examines the birds in OPORNYKH’s hands. On one of the chicken’s legs is a tag, and on the leg of one of the pigeons—a little roll of paper. He reads): “The chicken declares a curse on reckless wastefulness. She is being given an unnecessary mass of grain, in consequence of which grain goes to waste or is eaten by predators. But not one drop does she receive to drink. The chicken declares her indignation at this undervaluation. Signed—the Pioneer Brigade of the Little Giant state farm.”

SHCHOEV: We cannot procure such birds. There is no Party line to that effect. Toss her out, Petya!”

OPORNYKH takes the chicken by the head and tosses it out the door. The chicken’s head remains in his hands, but its torso disappears.

YEVSEI (looking at the chicken’s head and its blinking eyes): Now the chicken is worn out and will fly no further.

SHCHOEV (to ALYOSHA): And what does the Egyptian pigeon have to tell us?

ALYOSHA (reads): It’s written in a capitalist language. It’s not very clear to us.

SHCHOEV: Then pound the kulak propaganda into the ground!

MIUD: Let me eat the bird instead, with its paper.

SHCHOEV: Eat, child, every last bite.

YEVSEI (to MIUD): Oh no, you don’t! This might be the Egyptian proletariat sending us a bulletin about their achievements.22

SHCHOEV (pensively): A faraway and worn-out class…Opornykh, look after that pigeon as if it were your union membership card!

A distant noise. Everyone listens. The noise grows louder, turning into a boom.

OPORNYKH: What the hell’s going on now? (Exits.)

Small pause of fear.

YEVSEI (shouting with all his zeal): Ignat Nikanorovich, it’s a foreign intervention!

The work of the office comes to an immediate halt. MIUD takes the revolver out of her blouse. ALYOSHA takes the growling TUBE from SHCHOEV’s desk. It continues to growl in the hands of a human being. ALYOSHA and MIUD run out with these objects and disappear. The strange boom intensifies but grows, as it were, wider and softer, like a stream of water.

(Horrified) I told you, Ignat Nikanorovich, that mother bourgeoisie is one tough lady.

SHCHOEV: Don’t worry, Yevsei. Maybe this time it’s only the petty bourgeoisie…But where are my masses?

SHCHOEV looks around the office—which is empty. Shortly before this, the workers have all disappeared somewhere. KUZMA smashes through the doorway and squeezes his way into the office.23 He sits down amid the emptiness of the desks and takes up a pen. SHCHOEV and YEVSEI observe him in terror. MIUD enters, revolver in hand.

MIUD: It’s swan geese, flying swan geese…Idiots!

The boom turns into the voices of thousands of birds. The sound of birds’ feet touching the iron roof of the office; the birds are settling on it, calling to one another.

SHCHOEV: Yevsei! Call the office workers here. Where have they hidden themselves? Something or other needs to be put in order here!

KUZMA stands up and walks into the toilet, slamming the door brusquely behind him.

Scene 3

The same office as in scene 2. No TUBE on SHCHOEV’s desk. The place is empty. Only SHCHOEV. Birds cry pitifully outside; they are being attacked and exterminated with whatever comes to hand.

SHCHOEV (chewing some food): The people today do have one huge appetite. They build some kind of brick buildings, fences, or towers—and for that they want three meals a day, and I’m supposed to sit here and provide treats for every one of them. Yes, it’s tough being a cooperative system. Better if I’d been an object of some sort, or simply a consumer. Somehow we don’t have much of an ideological superstructure. Either we’ve invented everything already or there’s some other reason. I’m always craving some kind of pleasure! (Picks up some crumbs of the food he’s consumed and tips them into his mouth.) Yevsei!

YEVSEI (behind the office): Right away, Ignat Nikanorovich!

SHCHOEV: Where on earth can these bastard birds have sprung from? Everything was so quiet and consistent with the Plan, the entire apparatus had adopted the Party line for the organization of fleshy crayfish deeps—and now in come these birds! Try and procure them! O local populace, local populace, you’ll be the death of the whole cooperative system!…Klokotov!

KLOKOTOV (behind the office walls): Coming, Ignat Nikanorovich.

Enter KLOKOTOV, entirely covered in bird feathers.

SHCHOEV: Well, how is it out there?

KLOKOTOV: Not good at all, Ignat Nikanorovich—as you can see!

SHCHOEV: What’s going on out there?

KLOKOTOV: The whole Plan is falling apart, Ignat Nikanorovich…We adopted the Party line for the organization of fleshy crayfish deeps—and we should be guided by it. The midsection of a crayfish, Ignat Nikanorovich, is better than any beef. I mean, yesterday it was crayfish, today it’s flying birds, tomorrow wild beasts will come scampering out of the forest, and we, it seems, have to bring the whole system crashing to a halt because of these brute elements! (SHCHOEV is pensively silent.) It’s just no good, Ignat Nikanorovich—and the whole populace will be spoiled. Once we’ve got them used to one kind of food, that’s more than enough. As for what’s going on now! Looks like all the poultry life from every bourgeois tsardom may come tearing into our republic. They’re having a crisis over there—an overproduction crisis—but how are we meant to consume all this ourselves? There simply aren’t enough mouths!

SHCHOEV: And how are your crayfish doing in our mighty deeps?

KLOKOTOV: The crayfish are keeping mum, Ignat Nikanorovich—it’s early yet.

YEVSEI (enters, covered in bird feathers): Ignat Nikanorovich! Birds with official documents have arrived! Just look! (Takes a number of cardboard disks from his pocket.) Each one has a number—and an official seal! These birds are organized, Ignat Nikanorovich! I’m afraid of them!

SHCHOEV (slowly and pensively): Organized birds. Well ordered is the air above our land.

OPORNYKH (entering, wet all over, in tall boots): Fish are on the move, Ignat Nikanorovich!

KLOKOTOV: I knew it!

OPORNYKH: Fish are pressing forward along the surface and birds are flying down and gobbling them up…

YEVSEI: This will undermine our crayfish season, Ignat Nikanorovich!

SHCHOEV: And there’s no one at all…no larger animal of any kind, who might, in turn, make a meal of the birds? Nothing at all?

KLOKOTOV (with satisfaction): Of course there isn’t, Ignat Nikanorovich! And we don’t need anything now. For meat we’ll make do with crayfish. For butter we can use nut juice. And for milk we’ll mix wild honey with formic acid—and what more do we need? Science today, they say, has progressed a long way.24

YEVSEI: Little by little, Ignat Nikanorovich, we’ll provide for everyone. Everyone’s appetite will be fully developed!

OPORNYKH: So? Hmm…What do you say? Finish off the birds? Or go after the fish?

A noise offstage, growing louder, as in scene 2.

SHCHOEV: Go outside and look, Yevsei. (Yevsei disappears.) So why are these birds flying to us from the bourgeoisie?

OPORNYKH: Our country is mighty rich, Ignat Nikanorovich. Anything can get born here—and keep living!

SHCHOEV: Huh! If life here were that wonderful, everything would just crawl into the right packaging all by itself.

OPORNYKH: But human beings here are fools, Ignat Nikanorovich. We don’t have any—any whatchamacallit—any packaging here!25

SHCHOEV: I myself am a human being.

The noise intensifies. In runs YEVSEI.

YEVSEI: Another whole swarm is flying this way.

SHCHOEV: A swarm of what?

YEVSEI: Geese, sparrows, cranes—and roosters racing along below them. Some kind of seagulls too!²⁶

SHCHOEV: My God, my God…Why did you leave me at this post?²⁷ Better to have been some extremist—then I’d have gotten myself settled elsewhere by now.

OPORNYKH: Now all the fish will get gobbled up. So tell us, you, er, cooperative leadership, what we should do! Procure a Lenten meal out of the waters, or leave that to the priests?

YEVSEI (to OPORNYKH): No need to be overactivist, Petya, when no one’s even put you forward to volunteer!

SHCHOEV: Yevsei, think something definite for God’s sake. Can’t you see, my heart is aching.

YEVSEI: But I’ve already thought everything through, Ignat Nikanorovich.

SHCHOEV: Then make your report to me, take up the Party line, and move into action.

YEVSEI: The Air-Chem Defense Society has an artillery circle, Ignat Nikanorovich, and this circle has a cannon. With your permission we’ll bombard the flock of birds.

SHCHOEV: Fire away!

YEVSEI and KLOKOTOV exit. The noise offstage continues and turns into bird cries.

OPORNYKH: Ignat Nikanorovich! Why chase the birds away? We’d have managed to catch the birds and snatch up the fish too! The people—what’s the word—are willing to work.

SHCHOEV: And what if they are? Let the birds fly into other districts—people eat there too! Why be such an egotist? I’m truly surprised at you!

OPORNYKH mutters something to himself.

And what else is the matter? Have you forgotten, you unprincipled devil, that I now have undivided authority?28 Go on, Petya, go back to your fishing!

OPORNYKH (exiting): Well, and there’s one…er, what’s the word…peasant asshole for you!

SHCHOEV: Somehow I’m tired. It’s hard work having to feed such a troublesome population from cradle to grave.

The noise offstage fades a little, now only gently audible. Enter MIUD and ALYOSHA, both covered in bird feathers. MIUD even has feathers in her hair.

MIUD (to SHCHOEV): What makes you so very important?

SHCHOEV: I’m not important—I’m responsible. And why have you come back? Can’t you see that animals are attacking the cooperative?

ALYOSHA: It’s all right, Comrade Shchoev. The proletariat is always in need of food. We two procured a thousand items. We…

SHCHOEV: We, we, we… That’s enough of your bleating! What use would you be if it weren’t for me standing here at your head?

MIUD: Alyosha, where are the Party and the shock workers? I’m getting bored here!

SHCHOEV (somewhat pensively): Boredom…a tender, decent feeling…in youth it can lead to developmental complications.

Backstage something hisses, as if a huge fire were bursting into flame.

ALYOSHA (to SHCHOEV): Uncle, let’s think up some method of rationalization29—somehow nothing here seems quite scientific.

The noise offstage turns into a roar and suddenly ceases entirely.

SHCHOEV (pensively): Rationalization…(touches ALYOSHA) You may be a genius of the masses, but I too, brother, am a thoughtful person…(Deep in thought) Let science labor now while man rests beside her as if at a resort. That’ll be good. We will, at least, be able to rest our torsos.

Offstage—a continuous, intensifying roar, as from a blazing fire. A short pause. A quiet cannon shot. The back wall of the office (from the audience’s perspective) slowly collapses. A wind tears through the office, and thousands of birds fly up from the office roof. The landscape round about is revealed: two cooperative shops with shop assistants standing outside. A gate with the sign “Park of Culture and Leisure,” with a line of people standing outside it. KUZMA is first in line. At first, this entire spectacle is veiled in smoke. The smoke disperses. Four sturdy young women, members of the Air-Chem Defense Society, carry two stretchers into the office, entering through the collapsed wall. On the stretchers lie YEVSEI and KLOKOTOV. The stretchers are placed on the floor in front of SHCHOEV. YEVSEI and KLOKOTOV sit up on their stretchers.

YEVSEI: The cannon, Ignat Nikanorovich!

SHCHOEV: What about the cannon? A cannon’s a cannon!

YEVSEI: The cannon, Ignat Nikanorovich, took a whole hour to warm up—and then it fired.

SHCHOEV: And a good thing too!

KLOKOTOV: It fired at us!

YEVSEI: It shoots low, Ignat Nikanorovich. There’s a slogan hanging down from its muzzle…

SHCHOEV: And what about you two? Have you been shot dead or not?

YEVSEI: Oh no, Ignat Nikanorovich, we still have to go on living. Can’t be helped.

SHCHOEV (looking at the stretcher girls): And who are these girls?

YEVSEI: Oh, for them this is community service, Ignat Nikanorovich. They’re happy to lug people around.

LOCAL POSTMAN (runs up with his bag to the line of people standing outside the Park of Culture and Leisure): Citizens, give this packet to the cooperative—each of my steps, you know, is valuable, and anyway, you’re on your feet already.

The people in line point at KUZMA. The postman shoves the packet into some sort of opening in KUZMA and urgently races off into the distance. KUZMA begins to pace toward the cooperative office. Keeping their places in line, the people begin to move in the same direction, with KUZMA at their head.

SHCHOEV (to the Air-Chem Defense girls): Listen to me, girls. Since you love weighty burdens, lift this office wall back up again. As it is, I keep seeing various masses and my thoughts get scattered.

AIR-CHEM DEFENSE GIRL: All right, citizen, as you say! After all, that’s why you’re the boss—cuz no one ever sees you. What do you take us for—fools?

The four of them effortlessly pick up the log wall and put it back in place, blocking off the office from the outside world. The girls themselves are thus left outside.

MIUD: Alyosha, what’s going on here—capitalism, or a second something or other?

SHCHOEV: Yevsei, please organize this girl for me. She’s starting to give me heartburn.

YEVSEI: I’ll make a note of her, Ignat Nikanorovich.

SHCHOEV: And where is my office staff?

YEVSEI: It has the day off, Ignat Nikanorovich.

SHCHOEV (pensively): The day off…and a good thing if it never came back. I would take the office off the supply list and fulfill the Plan at the same time! Yevsei, let’s set our course in the direction of peoplelessness.

YEVSEI: Certainly, Ignat Nikanorovich. But how?

SHCHOEV: How? How am I meant to know?! We’ll set our course and that’s that!

ALYOSHA: We could invent some mechanism, Comrade Cooperative. Mechanisms can do office work too.

SHCHOEV: Mechanisms…Now there’s an idea for you! Some sort of scientific being will sit and spin its wheels and I will direct it. I like it! I could have the whole republic go mechanical and stop provisioning it altogether. How would that be, Yevsei?

YEVSEI: Things would be easier for us, Ignat Nikanorovich.

KLOKOTOV: A normal work tempo would begin!

MIUD: Birds are flying and fish are swimming. The peasants want something to eat—and these people think that…Alyosha, I don’t understand this place!

SHCHOEV: Here, let me be your head—then you’ll understand everything!

OPORNYKH (enters, wet all over): So then? This, er, what’s the word…these fish here…Are we to catch them, or should we let them live?

SHCHOEV: Procure them, of course.

OPORNYKH: But there aren’t any tubs, Ignat Nikanorovich…And the coopers are saying…er, how did it go…You haven’t given them any salt for a month. “Give us some salt,” they say. “Our daily bread is unsalted.”

SHCHOEV: Petya, you must go and tell them that they are opportunists.

OPORNYKH: But they told me that you’re an opportunist! What am I meant to do?

MIUD (to everyone): Who are they? Fascists?

OPORNYKH: What’s more, some girls I met were telling me about berries. Berries, they say, are everywhere in the woods…Everything—now how does it go—is flying, pressing forward, swimming and growing, but we don’t have any containers. I walk around and feel torment.

Noise offstage.

SHCHOEV (to ALYOSHA): Where is your music, musician? Somehow I’m feeling sad again from opinions and dreams. Yevsei, go and see who’s violating and making a noise out there.

YEVSEI exits. ALYOSHA and MIUD disappear outside with him. The noise of people offstage grows louder.

OPORNYKH: And, Ignat Nikanorovich, the flocks of birds have left heaps of droppings. Whole mounds are lying around, and this, people say, is a gold mine. So what should we do, procure it or just let it be?

The noise offstage grows quieter.

SHCHOEV: And what do you care about droppings? You are the most backward individual in your class. Foreign chemists make iron and cream from bird excrement, but to you it’s just droppings. What do you understand about anything?

Enter YEVSEI.

KLOKOTOV: Let’s send for a foreign scientist, Ignat Nikanorovich—we’re facing a mass of questions here.

YEVSEI: Yes, of course. Foreigners are given special food and they bring clothes in their suitcases.

SHCHOEV: That’s right, Yevsei…Who was that making a noise outside?

YEVSEI: Cooperative masses were heading this way, but I stopped them.

SHCHOEV: That was a mistake, Yevsei. You should have chosen a representative from them—so that there’d be one man, once and for all, to stand for all of them.

YEVSEI: But that’s just what I’ve done, Ignat Nikanorovich. I picked someone and gave him an official post—now he’ll calm down.

SHCHOEV: You did the right thing, Yevsei. For some reason you and I are always right.

A quiet knocking at the door.

Yes, please, be so kind as to come in.

Enter the Danish professor, EDUARD VALKYRIYA-HANSEN STERVETSEN, and his daughter Serena.30

STERVETSEN: Greetings, gentlemen Russian maximalist people!

SERENA: We are scienticity, which knows food. Greetings!

SHCHOEV: Greetings, gentlemen bourgeois scientists. We sit here and are always happy to see science.

YEVSEI: We procure science too.

STERVETSEN: From our child years we are maximum lovers of cooperativeness. Here in your Soviet of Russian Oonions you have wonderful cooperativeness. We want to learn all about your…I am in sad difficulty…your impetuous production of foods and goods.

SHCHOEV: So here you are at last. Our cooperativeness has become wonderful, has it, now that we’ve caught up with and surpassed you?³¹ Yevsei, respect these devils!

SERENA (to her father): He says—dyevil!

STERVETSEN (to his daughter): That, Serena, is because they don’t have any God here. Only his comrade is left—the dyevil.

SHCHOEV (solemnly): Comrade members of the bourgeoisie. You have arrived at the very height of the reorganization of our apparatus.32 So please, in the first place, go along, relax, collect your wits, and, in the second place, come back in ten days’ time to our cooperativeness—then we’ll show you! But leave your suitcases here—our land will endure any burden.

STERVETSEN: Wonderful (he bows). Let’s go, Seren. We need to hurry and collect our wits.

SERENA: Papa, I’m so happy for some reason…

They exit, leaving their suitcases in the office.

SHCHOEV: Yevsei! Organize me a ball! Arrange a vast rationalization, prepare a mighty nourishment!

YEVSEI: The rationalization I can manage—there is plenty of mind in the masses, but as for nourishment, I’m afraid there won’t be enough.

SHCHOEV (pensively): No nourishment, you say? Well, what of it? We’ll organize an evening of experimental trial of new forms of food. We’ll pick heaps of every kind of grass—then we’ll make flour from fish, snatch crayfish out of the water, turn bird droppings into chemistry, make soup with the lard from dead bones, and brew kvass from wild honey mixed half and half with formic acid. And furthermore—we’ll bake burdock pancakes such as will be eaten with enthusiasm and fervor. We’ll put all of Nature into these victuals and we’ll feed everyone with stuff that is cheap and eternal. Oh Yevsei, Yevsei, food is really just a social convention, nothing more!

A motorcycle engine sputters outside. Someone enters, an agent from a state collective farm.

AGENT: I’m from the Little Giant state farm. Our birds knocked down the aviary and flew the coop. And water undermined our dams and our fish all hurled themselves downstream. You haven’t noticed these animals in your district, have you?

YEVSEI: No, comrade, we procure only uncultured animals. We love hardships.

AGENT: But I’ve just seen people covered in feathers.

SHCHOEV: People covered in feathers! Someone’s lying. That’s not true, comrade!

AGENT: Huh?!

ACT 2

Scene 1

The same office, somewhat altered. It has been equipped with various mechanisms. As they are set in motion, the audience will understand their function. Along the back wall lie the foreigners’ suitcases. Everything is clean. A single long table, with nothing on it. A dais by the window. In one corner—a piano. On the opposite side of the room—the hurdy-gurdy. Instead of a handle, it now has a pulley. Running up from the pulley is a belt drive. Quiet. No people. In the other half of the office—the noise of food preparation. Enter YEVSEI and ALYOSHA.

YEVSEI: Well, how are you doing here? Everything decent and proper?

ALYOSHA: Everything has been arranged.

YEVSEI (looking ALYOSHA over): Seems like you’ve gotten thinner.

ALYOSHA: I’ve put forth much thought from my torso, and I feel bored here in your district. Yevsei, when will the future people set in? I’m sick and tired of the ones living now. You too are a shithead, you know!

YEVSEI: Me? Yes, I’m a shithead. That’s why I’m still in one piece. Otherwise I’d have perished long ago—I might not even have been born. What else could I be?

ALYOSHA: Then how come I’m alive myself?

YEVSEI: Spontaneously, elementally…But are you really alive? You move about, but you don’t exist. Why did you become a hurdy-gurdy man anyway, you fly-by-night devil?

ALYOSHA: I want to achieve socialism more quickly. I’m always longing for somewhere distant.

YEVSEI: Socialism will set in for the rational elements in society, but you will vanish without a trace. You are nothing, you need someone at your head.

ALYOSHA: So be it. I don’t give thought to myself anyway. I don’t understand. You’re more important than me, yet you’re a reptile through and through!

YEVSEI: It’s because of the masses. They’ve reptilized me. Think a moment about the material I’m expected to lead!

ALYOSHA (deeply thoughtful): There’ll be Communism soon. The world will move on without you.

YEVSEI: Without me? What do you mean? I’m afraid that without me the world will cease to exist—yes, no doubt about it!

The noise of food preparation grows louder. Enter SHCHOEV. ALYOSHA busies himself with setting up the various mechanisms.

SHCHOEV: Report, Yevsei!

YEVSEI: Everything is all right, Ignat Nikanorovich! The nettle soup is ready, the cabbage soup prepared from shrubs and wood fat is steaming, the mechanical sandwiches are lying in their posts, and the compote made from the juice of narrow minds is cooling on the roof. The black earth cutlets are frying, and as for the kasha made from locusts and ants’ eggs,33 it is stewing away, Ignat Nikanorovich! Everything else is being mobilized on the stove top—except the dessert made from glue and kvass, which is already done.

SHCHOEV: And the sauce—what sort of sauce will you serve?

YEVSEI: Sauce, Ignat Nikanorovich, is a tricky business. We are serving a liquid supporting sauce made from birch sap.

SHCHOEV: And, er, will there be anything particular for our clarity of long-term perspective?

YEVSEI: Vinegar, Ignat Nikanorovich—vinegar with crumbs of old tobacco and lilac bush!

SHCHOEV: Wonderful, Yevsei. Now, tell me—what’s the situation with our inventory?

ALYOSHA: Well, I’ve banged out a whole stack of wooden dishes. You didn’t have any spoons or cups anywhere—you hadn’t figured out that there are forests all around, and in these forests are collective farms with many able hands. You could build a whole Wooden Age here.

SHCHOEV: The Wooden Age…Well, that too was a fine transitional epoch!³⁴

Noise of people outside the door.

YEVSEI: The guest mass, Ignat Nikanorovich, is approaching.

SHCHOEV: Don’t let them in. Give us a moment to collect our wits.

Yevsei bolts the door.

Now, what are you going to give the scientific bourgeois and his daughter?

YEVSEI: Exactly the same, Ignat Nikanorovich. He said himself that he sympathizes with the great food of the future and is prepared to suffer for the new radiant nourishment.

SHCHOEV: And what am I going to eat?

YEVSEI: You, Ignat Nikanorovich, will be sharing with me. You and I will test the foreign scientist’s rations. I took all his food for experimental purposes.

SHCHOEV: You’re a smart one, Yevsei!

YEVSEI: But of course! One must develop in all directions.

Outside the locked door the guests are creating an uproar.

SHCHOEV: Let in the mouths to be fed, Yevsei. Alyosha, strike up some chords!

ALYOSHA starts the hurdy-gurdy. He pulls a lever, and the belt drive, slapping regularly against the pulley throughout the tune, begins to turn the crank of the hurdy-gurdy. The hurdy-gurdy softly and melodiously plays the waltz “On the Hills of Manchuria.”35 YEVSEI opens the door. Enter STERVETSEN with his daughter on his arm and carrying a box; KLOKOTOV; YEVDOKIA, the promoted proletarian; five young female office workers; PYOTR OPORNYKH with his wife, who is very small, on his arm; three male office workers with their wives; and GODOVALOV, the representative of the cooperative members. Then a FIREMAN in full uniform and helmet comes in and stands by the door, followed by a POLICEMAN. The hurdy-gurdy stops playing. STERVETSEN hands YEVSEI the box, which is full of food.

YEVSEI: Listen to me, comrade guests! Allow me to salute you for some reason or other. Let us all rejoice today and be glad—

SHCHOEV: Yevsei, stop your speechmaking! I haven’t yet had my say.

YEVSEI: Well I, Ignat Nikanorovich, as the saying goes—

SHCHOEV: You, Yevsei, should learn to act not as the saying goes but as good sense prompts. Listen to me, comrade guests…(The guests had almost taken their seats, but now they all stand, except for STERVETSEN and his daughter, and listen to SHCHOEV.) Local and foreign comrades! I want to say something special to you, but I have grown unaccustomed to happiness of mood. I am tormented by worries about providing adequate food for the masses…Perplexity languishes within me…In view of the increased tempo of the masses’ appetites, our cooperative system is confronted with one evident necessity—namely, to overcome some sort of evident underestimation of something…And so you just have to swallow your food, and when it lands in your stomach—well, let it sort things out for itself, let it feel bored there or rejoice. Now we must test in the depth of our own torsos a new form of nourishment, one we have procured from the impetuously produced materials of raw Nature. Long Live the Five-Year-Plan-Now-Being-Fulfilled-in-Four!

Universal applause. A general hurrah. People stop clapping and lower their hands, but the applause does not stop. Instead it grows louder, turning into a real ovation. Ever more loudly, the cry of “hurrah” is repeated in a metallic tone. The guests are all frightened. ALYOSHA squeezes the handle of a crude wooden mechanism (it is partly visible to the audience) that the belt drive is turning from above. It is applauding and shouting, “Hurrah!” ALYOSHA releases the handle—the belt drive stops turning, and the mechanism falls silent.

Yevsei!

YEVSEI: Alyosha!

ALYOSHA: Nourishment is served!

ALYOSHA pulls a lever. The rumble of an unknown mechanism. Then—quiet. Slowly, on a conveyor belt running along the table, there floats out a huge wooden tureen with steam pouring from it. All around the tureen, leaning against it, are hefty wooden spoons. The guests take the spoons.

SHCHOEV: Alyosha, some bold, heartening music!

ALYOSHA: Straightaway. What shall I play?

SHCHOEV: I’ll be grateful, please, if you could strike up something soulful!

ALYOSHA starts the hurdy-gurdy, which begins something soulful. The guests eat. SHCHOEV and YEVSEI sit on the dais. From the box provided by STERVETSEN, YEVSEI takes out a separate meal—cheese, sausage, etc.—and eats it with SHCHOEV on the dais.

OPORNYKH: Er…Ignat Nikanorovich! What is this? Have you instituted cabbage soup like this forever? Or is this just a one-off campaign?

SHCHOEV: Eat, Petya, don’t be an opportunist.

OPORNYKH: Who, me? All I’m saying is…er, what’s the word…we’ve still got beef and cabbage here in the republic. Maybe we’d be better off with regular cabbage soup? With this one, your stomach could go berserk!

YEVSEI: Petya, eat in silence. You’re performing a test on yourself.

OPORNYKH: I am being silent. Now I’m going to think, as a test.

The hurdy-gurdy falls silent.

SHCHOEV: Alyosha! Be so kind as to serve up the second course. Let’s test the kasha.

ALYOSHA pulls a lever. A rumble. The tureen of soup slowly creeps away. The rumbling stops. A bowl of kasha sails out.

GODOVALOV (stands): On behalf of all the consuming members of the cooperative, who have invested me with the authority to think for them, and also—

YEVSEI: To suffer torments of the soul on their behalf, Comrade Godovalov…

GODOVALOV: And also to suffer torments of the soul on their behalf…I express a universal, giant feeling of joy, and also of enthusiasm…

ALYOSHA turns on the automatic machine. Thunder of applause. GODOVALOV sits down. Everyone eats the kasha.

SHCHOEV: Well, how is it, comrades?

SERENA: Papa! Are these locusts? Are they eating saboteur insects?36

YEVSEI: That’s right, young lady. We’re hiding the little saboteurs away inside us.

SERENA: Then you will become saboteurs yourselves.³⁷

GODOVALOV: It’s a fine kasha, Ignat Nikanorovich.

FIRST MALE OFFICE WORKER: These experiments have an enormous educational significance, Comrade Shchoev. They should be organized once every ten days.

FIRST FEMALE OFFICE WORKER: Oh, it’s awfully nice here. This is my first time at an intervention.

SHCHOEV: Hey, idiot…Shut up if you don’t know the words. Sit there and feel something wordless.

FIRST FEMALE OFFICE WORKER: But there’s something I want, Ignat Nikanorovich. I’m all in a complete tizzy…

YEVSEI: Polya! You can tell your mama all about it in a whisper later, but right now you’re here for an experiment…

FIRST FEMALE OFFICE WORKER: Oh, Yevsei Ivanovich, I do so love our office…I do feel something so…

STERVETSEN: Nothing should be left untried. The whole world is only an experiment.

SHCHOEV: Swallow more quietly over there! Let us hear the words of science.

STERVETSEN: I say the whole world is but an experiment of God’s powers. Do you agree, Seren?

SERENA: But Papa, is God really a professor too? Why do you exist then?

YEVSEI (quietly to SHCHOEV): Ignat Nikanorovich, this is religious propaganda!

SHCHOEV: Let them be, Yevsei. It’s all right for them. They’re not normal. Alyosha! Bring us all the food to choose from!

ALYOSHA pulls the lever. Rumbling. The kasha floats off on the conveyor belt. The rumbling fades away. The conveyor belt gradually serves up a series of assorted dishes.

SHCHOEV: Comrades, please partake of these victuals without restraint. Here we have lots of everything—one-sixth of the entire terrestrial sphere…Alyosha! Organize the sandwiches!

ALYOSHA turns on another wooden apparatus; a loaf of bread has already been placed inside it. The apparatus slices the bread and then spreads the slices with some kind of white substance. Then the prepared sandwiches are tossed by the paw of the apparatus onto a wooden serving dish. The dish then moves onto the conveyor belt.

STERVETSEN (surveying the operation of the apparatus): This is mind-boggling, Seren. This is true hygiene!

SERENA: Papa, I like Alyosha.

SHCHOEV: Alyosha! Do something gracious for the foreign young lady—she likes you.

ALYOSHA walks over to SERENA and kisses her, lifting her whole body off the floor.

STERVETSEN: This is barbaric, Seren.

SERENA (smoothing herself down): Don’t worry, Papa. It’s not as if it hurt. And I have to get a feeling for the Oonion of Russian Soviets.

SHCHOEV (to ALYOSHA, sternly): Don’t be unprincipled, Alyosha…

SERENA (to ALYOSHA): Is there anything in the world that you love—or only Communism?

ALYOSHA: More than anything else I love the zeppelin. I’m always thinking about how it will rise up above the whole of the poor earth, how every one of the collective farmers will look up at the sky and begin to weep, and I, all in tears of class joy, will start the motors with a mighty roar. We will fly against the wind, over all the oceans—and world capitalism, beneath this huge torso of science and technology, will begin to grieve mightily because of the flying masses…

SERENA: I’m listening…But in Moscow one lonely member told me that you all love shock workers and everyone who labors to catch up with and surpass.

YEVSEI: He’s a fly-by-night, he thinks only of flitting off somewhere, while our dear masses live on foot…

ALYOSHA (answering SERENA): You don’t understand, and he (indicating YEVSEI) is no different from your own people. He’s not the class—he is a compromiser…

SERENA: But Europe has zeppelins too.

ALYOSHA: So what?

SHCHOEV: Their zeppelins have narrow minds.

ALYOSHA (to SERENA): You don’t understand, because you belong to the bourgeoisie. You’re an uncollectivized egotist! You imagine you have a soul…

SERENA: Yes.

ALYOSHA: You don’t. But we will have a zeppelin. It will fly above the propertyless terrestrial sphere, above the Third International.38 Then it will descend, and the proletariat of the whole world will touch it with their hands…

SHCHOEV (to YEVSEI): And there was I, thinking he was an idiot.

YEVSEI: Well, we used to have only clear, straightforward idiots, but he is a back-to-front idiot.

SERENA (to ALYOSHA): You affect me like a landscape. I feel sadness…how do you say it…inside my blouse. (STERVETSEN takes out a packet of Troika cigarettes and lights up.) Papa, why are you and I uncollectivized egotists?

STERVETSEN: Seren, you shock me.

OPORNYKH (drinking a cup of vinegar): I drink to all countries and states where the…er…proletariat lifts its head to catch a glimpse of our, er, what’s the word, our zeppelin!

SHCHOEV (standing solemnly): To the zeppelin of the Revolution, to the members of the universal cooperative, and…to all the slogans published in the local press—hurrah!

EVERYONE: Hurrah!

After this exclamation, a silence suddenly sets in, but the second male office worker shouts, “Hurrah!” again, in a solitary voice, not noticing this silence.

SHCHOEV (to the shouter): Vasya, that’s enough of your craziness! Shocking!

The office worker immediately falls silent. Noise outside the office.

Alyosha! Start up the ball!

GODOVALOV: Let me just drink up this watery fruit juice. (Drinks compote from a clay jug.)

OPORNYKH (to STERVETSEN): I feel like a smoke. How about treating us to one of those…er…what’s the word…goods that get dumped?39

STERVETSEN hands him the packet of Troikas. OPORNYKH takes three cigarettes and gives two to his neighbors. The guests hurry to finish up the food, except for SERENA, who is talking with ALYOSHA.

SHCHOEV (pensively): A ball…I do love the joyful civil strife of humanity!

One of the employee guests walks over to a window and opens it. The noise of the district town rushes in, then gradually fades away. Three half-childish faces appear at the window and look in. The employee guest indifferently blows smoke into these faces, and the smoke floats out into the gloom of the district night.

YEVSEI (to STERVETSEN): Mister Bourgeois Scientist, have you perhaps formed an opinion of our models for nourishment—or are you still chewing it over?

STERVETSEN: I would say that an opinion is taking shape within me. But does that sound like impetuous drifting, or a sign of an incomplete evaluation? I am bored and lost without understanding.

YEVSEI: Oh, never mind—you’re not a Marxist, after all. We can teach you. May I look at your self-writing system? It’s an import, isn’t it?

STERVETSEN (handing YEVSEI his fountain pen): I recommend it to you. It’s excellent, it’s automatic.

YEVSEI: It writes all by itself?

STERVETSEN: No, it has no activism of its own. You have to think like a…what’s the word…like an uncollectivized egotist…

YEVSEI: I see. And there was I, imagining it could think something itself. But it’s just one of your opportunists. Leave it as a model. Alyosha will surpass it.

LITTLE GIRL OUTSIDE THE WINDOW: Uncle, give us a bite to eat!

SERENA (to ALYOSHA): Why do you look so bored on your face?

ALYOSHA: Because I’m always yearning for socialism…

SERENA: And will it be wonderful?

ALYOSHA: For a question like that I could kill you. Can’t you see?

SERENA: No, I see only you.

LITTLE GIRL: Uncle, give us a little bite!

ANOTHER FACE (from the population gathered outside the window): Anything at all!

Outside the window, behind everyone else, appears the face of MIUD.

SHCHOEV: Alyosha, now let’s have the unofficial part!

ALYOSHA pulls some lever, and the table with the remnants of the victuals slowly crawls away into an opening in the side of the office wall. The guests are all standing.

VOICE FROM OUTSIDE THE WINDOW: Even if it tastes bad…even the dregs…

VOICE OF AN ALIEN, OF PEASANT GARBAGE (from an adult outside the window): Even just a bit of swill. I too was a member once.40

The FIREMAN closes the window. But another, neighboring window is opened from outside, and the same faces appear in it, in the very same order, as if they hadn’t moved an inch. The FIREMAN closes this window too. The first window opens again, and again the same faces appear, in their unalterable order.

SHCHOEV: Yevsei! Call the population to order!…Alyosha, play something tender…

ALYOSHA switches on the belt drive of the hurdy-gurdy and, slapping regularly against the pulley, the belt turns the hurdy-gurdy; it plays a tender melody, a waltz. The guests begin to move to its rhythm.

YEVSEI (into the window): Why are you staring like that?

GIRL’S VOICE (from the window): We’d like something a little bit tasty.

ALIEN, GARBAGE VOICE: Give me, please, something to put down my gullet.

YEVSEI: Here, drink for the love of God! (Gives one of them a cup of vinegar left on the dais.) Please understand that we are holding a scientific evening here—people are suffering torment on your account, O my brother.

Someone outside the window drinks the vinegar and passes the cup back.

ALIEN, GARBAGE VOICE: I love anything liquid…

The guests are dancing: ALYOSHA with SERENA, OPORNYKH (a tall man) with his tiny wife, STERVETSEN with YEVDOKIA the promoted proletarian, etc. Only SHCHOEV is sitting down, thinking in his elevated position.

SHCHOEV: I respect this pleasure of the masses.

YEVSEI (moving nearer to SHCHOEV): Somehow, Ignat Nikanorovich, I’ve this minute come to love all our citizens.

SHCHOEV: All animals, Yevsei, love one another. But what we need isn’t love, it’s the Party line…(more thoughtfully) the Party line…without it, we’d all have lain down flat on our backs long ago…

The waltz continues. OPORNYKH, pressing his wife to himself, pukes over her head into an urn in the corner but does not stop his polite conjugal dance. His wife does not notice this fact.

MIUD: Alyosha! Let us inside!

ALYOSHA doesn’t hear as he dances with Serena, who has already turned completely white and is convulsing rather than dancing. STERVETSEN, now pale, suddenly falls toward the piano. YEVSEI grabs the urn and respectfully holds it near STERVETSEN’s mouth. Outside the window stands MIUD. Beside her appears the face of KUZMA, his chin resting on the windowsill. There are no other people; the district night is clearly visible.

STERVETSEN: I thank you. The food did not exit but assimilated itself deep within.

YEVSEI: If you—even you—didn’t vomit, then you can count on it that our population isn’t going to puke.

The FIRST FEMALE OFFICE WORKER begins to twist her body from side to side as she dances. Her jaw and throat are seized by convulsions. She feels a terrible sense of nausea. She moves almost as if she is suffering a fit, her whole body shaking from gastric pain. Exactly the same is happening to her coworker and dance partner.

FIRST FEMALE OFFICE WORKER: Oh, all in all I am most absolutely content, but I can’t any longer…I haven’t the strength…My whole soul is leaving me.

STERVETSEN: Sell it to me, mademoiselle.

All the remaining dancers are similarly convulsed by spasms of nausea, but the dance continues all the same. Bodies now out of control embrace one another in torment, but the pressure of gastric stuff is right there at their throats, and the dancers recoil from one another. The music fades away.

KUZMA (sings from outside the window): High above in the clear blue sky…

MIUD (also outside the window, continuing the song in a pitiful voice): Waves a scarlet banner.

SERENA (her failing body barely moving in the dance, sadly to ALYOSHA): Oh, I feel so sad in my stomach!

ALYOSHA: What is it? Is your soul taking leave of your body?

SERENA (bends over in convulsions and does something into a handkerchief): My soul’s already left! (The music has stopped altogether. The guests are seated along the sides of the rooms, convulsing in their chairs from gastric emotions. Immediately after the fact of the handkerchief, SERENA changes, turns joyful, and dances on alone. To her father) Papa, what I’d like now is a little fox-trot. (STERVETSEN sits down at the piano and begins to play a slow, pessimistic fox-trot. SERENA moves about and sings):

Oh, sailor who sails the oceans no more,

Oh, my far-far-traveled young lad,

Sail back for a last farewell—

Without you,

Even fox-trots are sad.

(Sadly, to ALYOSHA) Where do you keep your Bolshevik soul? Without it, Europe weeps in boredom…

ALYOSHA: The bourgeoisie must weep without respite. It’s good for them to do a little crying!

SERENA: Oh, Alyosha, Bolshevism is so sweet! Life here is so joyful and hard! Embrace me with your Bolshevik fearlessness!

ALYOSHA (pushing SERENA away): I’m not interested. You’re a member of the bourgeoisie.

OPORNYKH: Er…now, what’s the name…Ignat Nikanorovich, may I throw up, please—the second helping is still with me.

GODOVALOV (pleading): Ignat Nikanorovich, I just need to heave up that one extra mouthful—I took too large a serving.

FIRST FEMALE OFFICE WORKER: Comrade Shchoev, please, let me go off duty now! I’ve already spent a whole evening being joyful.

SHCHOEV: Silence! School yourselves in self-control—you are opening a new epoch of radiant food. The whole world is developing, thanks to patience and torment. (Pensively) Patience! That’s the reason why time keeps moving somewhere.

YEVSEI (to the guests): That’s enough of your bellyaching!

KUZMA is crying outside the window. Some kind of liquid is trickling down his iron face.

MIUD (through the window): Alyosha, take us in, we’re bored and weary. Fascist Nature is blowing at me out here, and Kuzma is crying.

ALYOSHA (suddenly remembering them): Miud!

He drags first MIUD, then KUZMA in through the window. KUZMA rumbles. The guests all turn their faces to the wall; they are tormented by nausea. KUZMA eats the remnants of the office’s food supply. The clock strikes in the town belfry.

SERENA: Papa, where do they keep their superstructure?

STERVETSEN (to SHCHOEV): Mister Patron! We are most desirous, and you would gladden all Pan-Europe if you could let us have the fiery spirit from within your state superstructure.41

KUZMA goes into the toilet.

SERENA: Or even just sell us a Party line…Papa, that’ll be cheaper!

SHCHOEV (pensively): You want to procure for yourselves our spirit of enthusiasm?

YEVSEI (to SHCHOEV): Let them have it, Ignat Nikanorovich, even though there is no norm for such sales. What we need now is containers and packaging, not spirit.

SHCHOEV: Well then! We have any number of Party lines on enthusiasm, almost a surplus, as it turns out. (From the toilet comes the distinct, cast-iron sound of KUZMA belching. After KUZMA, the guests all do the same, simultaneously. SHCHOEV turns his attention to the guests.) Be off now and go to bed. Tomorrow’s a working day. (The guests disappear. SHCHOEV, YEVSEI, STERVETSEN, SERENA, MIUD, ALYOSHA, and the FIREMAN and the POLICEMAN remain. SHCHOEV then turns his attention back to STERVETSEN.) Well then, we can let you have some ideological lines, but only in exchange for foreign currency!

An explosion of collective nausea offstage.

YEVSEI: They stuffed themselves till they burst, the monsters. They’re yelping now…but they’ll get used to it!

POLICEMAN AND FIREMAN (smiling): They have no self-control.

Scene 2

The stage as before. MIUD is sleeping on a bench, hugging KUZMA. YEVSEI dozes in a chair. SERENA sleeps on a tall writing desk. SHCHOEV, ALYOSHA, and STERVETSEN are still awake at the table. Through the open window, stars are visible over the district.

SHCHOEV: You offer too little, Mister Bourgeois Scientist. You seem to be forgetting that this product is perishable. Or else you forget the difference between market prices and what the government pays for a product—but that difference is quite something!42 Do you know where we keep our Party lines?

STERVETSEN: I am not in possession of this fact, Comrade Shchoev.

SHCHOEV: Well, if you lack understanding, you shouldn’t be bargaining. Do you imagine we keep our superstructure heaped up in a barn somewhere like bales of hay? Do you think we just hire a watchman, at the lowest wage category, pay him twice a month, buy him some felt boots for the winter—and that’s that?! You’re a fine one, you foreign interventionist devil!

KUZMA (in his sleep): The Roman Catholic Pope…R-r-reptiles…

SHCHOEV: You’re right, Kuzma—one hundred percent and then some! And you, sir, are an agent of the bourgeoisie…

STERVETSEN: I’m not an agent. I’m a cultural personality of Europe.

SHCHOEV: It’s all the same. Once you enter our periphery, you no longer possess a personality. I’m the personality here…Just think a little further—calculate how much each idea costs us in storage alone! Figure it out: we store each idea in millions of seasoned personalities, each of which not only has to be fed—but also to be insured, protected from decay, and thoroughly worked over, so that the air inside them doesn’t turn bad and cause the directive to molder and rot. A line is a delicate product, Mister Scientist—we’re not just talking about some mushroom!

YEVSEI (in his sleep): Didn’t we have our share of problems with those mushrooms, Ignat Nikanorovich?

SHCHOEV: Then you must add up the construction costs for each line!

STERVETSEN: But is your soul really manufactured like some industrial product?

SHCHOEV: Our soul is the superstructure, you idiot! The superstructure rising over the interrelationships of stuff! Of course we manufacture it! In our district consumers’ union a single ideological resolution took us three whole years. The attendance of forty thousand members was required in order to clarify a line of central importance. Fourteen campaigns were carried out among the masses! Thirty-seven of our senior instructors were thrown into the thick of our membership for a period of eighteen months! Two hundred and fourteen meetings were held with a combined attendance of seven thousand of our constituent souls! On top of this, you must figure in the general assemblies, where the total must have been a matter of millions!…That’s what it takes to construct a single line! And you want to purchase the entire superstructure! The whole of Europe won’t even be enough to transport it. And where’s your packaging? You don’t have a suitable international personality…

KUZMA: The Roman Catholic Pope…

SHCHOEV: The Pope, Kuzma, will not do. He is a pitiful scheming opportunist. (Pensively) A vile simplifier of the Party line of Jesus Christ and nothing more.

ALYOSHA: Comrade Shchoev, let me transport it to them. Within me lies a mass of revolutionary spirit! I sense everything in advance of the future. I ache all over from the boredom and misery of foreign capitalism!

STERVETSEN: I don’t understand…I nourish myself with food, but I live with my soul. In the West our hearts have grown quiet, but your hearts…are shock workers of joy hammering in your chests. Our poor intelligentsia wish for your soul. We’re just asking if we can have it a little cheaper—we have a crisis and our minds are full of sorrow.

SHCHOEV: You have my sympathy. But what can we do with you when you’re such beggars? Our ruble, my brother, is a controlled currency.

KUZMA: We need to come to an understanding with capitalism.

ALYOSHA: Better to lie there in silence, Kuzma, now that I’ve fixed you up.

MIUD (in her sleep): Don’t wake me up, Kuzya, I’m seeing a dream.

SHCHOEV: I know, Kuzma, what has to be done. I don’t want to, but I must. He, the interventionist devil, is never going to understand that the resolutions we construct are giants of consciousness. He wants to buy them for nothing. Excavating the Kuzbass coalfields will prove cheaper and quicker than the completion of our district regulations! Hey, Yevsei!

YEVSEI (in his sleep): Hmm?

SHCHOEV: What did it cost us to construct our district regulations?

YEVSEI: Just a minute, Ignat Nikanorovich! Er, according to executive estimate number 48/11, forty thousand rubles and a few kopecks, excluding the expenditure of human resources during public meetings.

SHCHOEV (to STERVETSEN): See! And you wanted to purchase an entire line! You’d be better off with a small directive—I can let you have one at a discount.

STERVETSEN: Really? And does it come together with your enthusiasm?

SHCHOEV: We don’t deal in defective goods! Your merchant bourgeoisie has had no cause to complain of us.

STERVETSEN: And what funds do you require of us?

SHCHOEV: Yevsei!

YEVSEI (dozing): Huh?

SHCHOEV: How much would you and I charge for a small directive, including all our markups?

YEVSEI: Thirty-seven rubles apiece, Ignat Nikanorovich! That’s the cost of a suit cut to fit the average member of the intelligentsia.

STERVETSEN: I have suits with me!

YEVSEI: Then hand them over!

ALYOSHA (to YEVSEI): Don’t take anything from him. Let me give you my own shirt and trousers!

YEVSEI: You can hang on to those old britches—you certainly didn’t pay foreign currency for material like that!

ALYOSHA: You devils! I’ll kill you with my bare hands! This comrade wants to immerse himself in our ideals, and you—

YEVSEI: We are undressing him so he can dive in and cleanse himself completely.

SHCHOEV: Alyosha, calm your psychology! This isn’t a private establishment.

STERVETSEN: Seren!

SERENA: Oui?

STERVETSEN: Where’s our wardrobe?

SERENA: Straightaway, Papa!

She gets up and goes into the corner, where there are two suitcases. YEVSEI moves in on the suitcases too.

ALYOSHA (to SHCHOEV): What you’re selling him isn’t an ideal—it’s mere bureaucracy! I’ll inform the Party!

SHCHOEV: You’re a hundred percent right. Let bureaucracy attack the bourgeoisie too—let them too start to itch all over. (Pensively) Bureaucracy…We’ll set it against capitalism—and good-bye, Fascists! Look how scared they were by our timber, the dratted demagogues! They should be grateful we’re selling them timber! We could have been making paper from that wood, processing a soul from that paper, and then setting that soul loose on them…That really would have given them something to cry about…

In the meantime YEVSEI has cast off his trousers and padded jacket and re-dressed himself in a foreign suit.

YEVSEI (takes a folder of papers and offers one sheet to STERVETSEN. Holding the folder open): Sign in receipt!

STERVETSEN (signs, takes the paper, then reads): “Circularly. On the principles of autoarousal of enthusiasm.” We like that. Let us have still more of your mood!

YEVSEI: All right. Ignat Nikanorovich, here’s a jacket for your old woman.

SHCHOEV: Yes, give it to me, Yevsei! An old bat is a sentient being too.43

YEVSEI removes a brightly colored jacket from the suitcase and tosses it onto SHCHOEV’s desk. STERVETSEN signs another receipt and receives a second document.

STERVETSEN (reading): “Partial Additional Notes to the Regulations for Cultural Work”—very good!

SHCHOEV: There you are! Study, feel, and you will become a decent member of the class.

STERVETSEN: Thank you!

KUZMA (stands up, takes from somewhere inside himself the paper given to him by the LOCAL POSTMAN, and hands it to STERVETSEN): Here!

STERVETSEN (taking the document): I thank you kindly.

KUZMA: Gimme, r-r-reptile!

STERVETSEN: Please, help yourself.

STERVETSEN brings KUZMA a small, open suitcase. KUZMA takes a brightly colored vest and some trousers and calms down.

ALYOSHA (to SHCHOEV): Why is it, Comrade Shchoev, that when I look at you, and at almost everyone, my heart starts to ache?

SHCHOEV: It’s still unseasoned, that’s why it aches!

KUZMA: No peace…Eclectical.

SHCHOEV: Precisely, Kuzma! There’s no peace…I don’t sleep nights—and what do I hear from above? “Your tempos aren’t enough!” I want some tenderness from the superstructure, but they just tell me to find my own joy…I’m bored, Kuzma!

KUZMA: They’re tearing toward the future…R-r-reptiles…

MIUD stirs and opens her eyes.

SHCHOEV: Yes, Kuzma, they’re tearing along!…O Lord, Lord, if only you truly existed!

YEVSEI (rummaging about in the suitcases): There are still good things here, Ignat Nikanorovich! Maybe there’s some small Party line we can sell them in exchange for more foreign goods?

SHCHOEV: All right, Yevsei…We will, after all, remain standing even without the Party line. And if we collapse, we’ll just keep on living lying down…Ah, wouldn’t it be good to live lying down for a while!

ALYOSHA: Go on then—sell them the whole superstructure at once! We won’t miss it—we’ll see a soul grow up out of its remnants!

SHCHOEV: You’re right, Alyosha. But where can we get hold of the superstructure all in one, so we can invoice it as a single item?

ALYOSHA: The entire superstructure, Comrade Shchoev, is present within you. You, after all, are the most organized man in the district! As for the rest of us, we have no superstructure. We’re the lower mass, you’ve said it yourself.

SHCHOEV: That could well be! I do, all the time, feel something truly great—only I keep saying the wrong thing.

STERVETSEN: Your feeling is just what we need!

MIUD: Sell them Shchoev, Alyosha. He is the bastard of socialism.

ALYOSHA (quietly): I’ve been sensing everything for a while, Miud. Lie in sleep a while longer.

SHCHOEV: So it’s true, is it, Yevsei? I’m to sell my soul for the sake of the Soviet Socialist Republic?44 Yes, I shall doom myself for the sake of socialism—so let socialism be content, let the young ones remember me. Ah, Yevsei, I long to perish—the entire international proletariat will weep for me. Sad music will resound throughout Europe and in other parts. In exchange for hard currency, carrion bourgeois will consume the soul of a proletarian!

YEVSEI: They will gobble you up, Ignat Nikanorovich, and steal our enthusiasm. And without you, the whole Soviet Socialist Republic will be orphaned—and what will we do then? Who will stand at our head? (Contorts his face for weeping, but tears are unable to flow. In anguish he puts on a pince-nez from the pocket of the suit, formerly STERVETSEN’s, that he is now wearing.)

SHCHOEV: You may well be right, Yevsei! Think this over and report later.

ALYOSHA: There isn’t anything to think over. Drive a harder bargain with the bourgeoisie for your torso, in which your ideological soul is quivering! Or have you stopped loving the republic, you bastard?

STERVETSEN (to SHCHOEV): Please, I beg you…If you could…the superstructure…the psyche of joy…I beg you to ensoul Europe with the whole heart of your culture. Let’s set off for our world!

SHCHOEV: To stand at your head, yes?

STERVETSEN: You communicate truly. We need your entire enterprise of culture.

Indistinctly and fearfully, SERENA mutters in French in her sleep.45

SHCHOEV: Something has frightened the young lady.

YEVSEI: There’s no Party line—that’s why she’s afraid. Class consciousness is disintegrating.

ALYOSHA: Go on, Comrade Shchoev! Ask for a million!

SHCHOEV: I’m worth somewhat more than that sum. What do you think, Yevsei?

YEVSEI: I’ve puzzled over this and thought everything through. Ignat Nikanorovich, as our leading superstructure-in-chief, must remain in the Soviet Socialist Republic because the Soviet Socialist Republic is dearer to us than the remaining entirety of vile dry land.

SHCHOEV: You’re right, Yevsei!

ALYOSHA: Get along, both of you, to the other world. There’s no one we hold less dear…

YEVSEI: Wait a minute, Alyosha, before you overstep into extremism…I reckon we can quickly locate a suitably progressive personality among the members of our cooperative. Let one of them journey into Fascism and give it an appropriate mood. To us it’s empty piffle—all they want is the spirit, and spirit is nothing. We’ve nowhere to put it—what we need is materialism!

SHCHOEV: Could we let them have Opornykh?

YEVSEI: Our Petya? He’s a fool, we hold him dear…

SHCHOEV: How about Godovalov, then?

YEVSEI: Unseasoned. Always full of joy about one thing or another.

SHCHOEV: Some female or other?

YEVSEI: They’ll demand a discount, Ignat Nikanorovich. It’s not worth it.

SERENA (in her sleep): Oh Papa, Papa, I love this Soviet Alyosha so much, and I can’t wake up from our sadness.

STERVETSEN: Sleep, little girl of ours.

SERENA: But Papa, this happens as rarely as life itself. Only once.

YEVSEI: A fine line this fool of a girl has decided to follow!

SHCHOEV: Well, who can we send with this burden of spirit?

KUZMA:…A quiet, rational constituent element.

SHCHOEV (of KUZMA): He thinks almost like me. Let’s send a quiet, rational element.

YEVSEI: Lie down for the time being and rest, Ignat Nikanorovich. Tomorrow we’ll call the members together and take bids for the best ideologicality. There’s sure to be some element or other we can send.

SHCHOEV: You’re very smart, Yevsei! Good-bye, Mister Bourgeois Scientist. Farewell, Kuzma!

KUZMA: Sleep, activists!

SHCHOEV: Kuzma, are you alive?

KUZMA: Yes, almost the same as you…

MIUD: Alyosha, all I see in my dreams are bourgeoisie and subkulaks. But you and I—we’re not there!

ALYOSHA: Fight them, Miud, even in your dreams! Where are they?

YEVSEI: Citizens, I beg you to stay calm. Socialist construction is going on here. Give me a chance to conclude a contract with the professor for our Party lines…

MIUD (shoving KUZMA onto the floor): Get away from me, you opportunist. You’re on their side.

KUZMA crashes onto the floor. A clock strikes in the district town.

ACT 3

Scene 1

The same government office, now empty, without mechanical constructions. A conference of the cooperative members. Everyone who was at the culinary ball is present, as well as about ten other people of various personalities. A dais. On the dais sit SHCHOEV and YEVSEI. They—along with OPORNYKH, GODOVALOV, and KLOKOTOV—are wearing suits of foreign make. SHCHOEV is also wearing horn-rimmed glasses. YEVSEI is wearing the pince-nez. KUZMA—in a foreign vest and trousers—looks completely human. STERVETSEN and SERENA are now dressed very badly. STERVETSEN is wearing a short, typhoid-yellow peasant jacket, cotton quilted trousers like those worn by the local volunteer militia, and a peaked cap. SERENA is wearing a cook’s chintz housecoat and, over her head, a small locally made shawl. The conference has already been in session for a long time. General hubbub.

SHCHOEV (smoking a cigar, pensively, in a sudden silence): There just isn’t anyone. They’re all well seasoned, they all have something radiant storming inside them—but it isn’t enough. Petya, how’s your soul doing?

OPORNYKH: Well, Ignat Nikanorovich, everything…er, what’s the word…is quite all right with it. I even…er…feel fine.

SHCHOEV: And what do you think, Godovalov?

GODOVALOV: I don’t think, Ignat Nikanorovich. I’m full of joy.

YEVSEI: What about the girl? Should we send Miud?

SHCHOEV: Good idea, Yevsei. Girl! How are you inclined?

MIUD: I am definitely opposed!

SHCHOEV: Opposed—to what?

MIUD: Opposed to you. Because you are a shithead, a eulogizer of the status quo, and a rightist-leftist element.46 You’ve tormented the whole local mass, you have no packaging, you’re a predatory reptile to the poor class—that’s what you are! Alyosha, I’m bored here, I’m all in tears. Let’s get away from here and move on to socialism.

ALYOSHA: Wait a bit, Miud. I may yet ignite enthusiasm within them. Or else extinguish them forever!

MIUD: Better to extinguish them forever. Because at night I hear in the distance the clatter of hammers, and wheels—and nails! And then my heart aches, Alyosha, because you and I are not there! I want to be with the shock workers—I want it to be true hardship that makes me bored and weary!

KUZMA: Vote unanimously…Adopt!

SHCHOEV: There’s nothing to vote on, Kuzma. We’ve yet to come to an opinion.

GODOVALOV: Ignat Nikanorovich, sell Yevsei Ivanovich to the bourgeoisie. He’ll fetch a good price!

YEVSEI: Vasya! Keep your mouth shut—you have yet to be reelected to the committee!

FIRST FEMALE OFFICE WORKER: Ignat Nikanorovich! Entrust me with this mission…I have taken part in the cultural relay.47 A luxurious charm of spirit has long lain hidden in me, I just didn’t talk about it…I’m crazy about competition with Europe!

SHCHOEV (pensively): Oh women, women, why are you endowed below, but not above? Yevsei, think something up, for God’s sake! Can’t you see—I’m languishing.

YEVSEI: But I’ve already thought something up, Ignat Nikanorovich! We’ll send Kuzma!

SHCHOEV: What do you mean, Yevsei? He is pure idea!

YEVSEI: But that’s what we’re selling, Ignat Nikanorovich—pure idea! The superstructure! The empty piffle above the base! And Kuzma is someone firm, well seasoned, almost rational!

MIUD: Let them sell him, Alyosha. I don’t care in the least about Kuzya. All I care about is fulfilling the Five-Year Plan within four years.

SERENA: Papa, let them give us Alyosha! He is the superstructure!

MIUD (turning on SERENA in fury): You are an idiot of capitalism! Alyosha would unsettle the whole of your Europe—that’s what!

SERENA: But I’m already unsettled…

SHCHOEV: Kuzma! We’re packing you off into the bourgeoisie like so much freight, and there you will exist as the ideology of their culture! Can you manage to be alive?

KUZMA: I can’t be alive…R-r-reptiles…

SHCHOEV: What’s the matter with you?

KUZMA: I don’t want to be alive. I will make mistakes…I want to remain iron.

SHCHOEV: A sad element.

YEVSEI: He is afraid of losing his steadfastness, Ignat Nikanorovich. Afraid of falling into groundless enthusiasm and sliding from his convictions into deviation. He—is a rational element.

KUZMA: I’m afraid of backsliding from the Party line…The living rejoice in their enthusiasm and feel torment, whereas I feel doubt and rest in peace. There’s nobody there, r-r-reptiles. Only Comrade Uglanov, Mikhail Pavlovich!48

SHCHOEV: He is indeed a rational element.

SERENA (pointing at KUZMA): Who is this, Alyosha?

ALYOSHA: He has become a bourgeois toady.

SERENA: A shock worker?

ALYOSHA: He shocks us. We thought him up expressly—for the conduct of educational work.

MIUD: Kuzya is a shithead. An opportunist.

OPORNYKH: Er…what is she saying?

ONE OF THE MEMBERS: Ignat Nikanorovich, allow me to go and disintegrate Europe!

OPORNYKH: This…er…you know…Maybe, Ignat Nikanorovich, it’s only here that we seem unfit for ideologicality—while over there we might come to our senses?

STERVETSEN: In all solidarity, I beg your pardon…but if such a sale would cause you a deficit…

YEVSEI: That’s right, scientist. Your price will put us in the red…Sweeten the pot a little.

STERVETSEN: We are almost in agreement…

SHCHOEV: Your calculations are correct, Yevsei. Let him throw himself into the pot. Enlist him as scientific personnel until the end of the Five-Year Plan.

YEVSEI: He’ll sneak away somewhere, Ignat Nikanorovich!

SHCHOEV: Well then we’ll—we’ll…We’ll get him to sign something.

GODOVALOV: Find him a wife, and that’ll be it! Yevdokia’s still wandering about without any workload. Let him show Yevdokia a little love…

SHCHOEV: Yevdokia!

YEVDOKIA emerges out of the mass.

SHCHOEV (pointing to STERVETSEN): Could you love a foreign muzhik?

YEVDOKIA: I sure can! Why wouldn’t I?!

SHCHOEV (to STERVETSEN): Here’s a female person for you—stick it out with her for a couple of years, then I’ll give you a divorce. Now you can kiss.

YEVDOKIA throws her arms around STERVETSEN and is the first to kiss.

YEVSEI: But what about his daughter, Ignat Nikanorovich? His daughter will miss him.

SHCHOEV: Just a minute…Alyosha, embrace the young lady bourgeoise. Love her a little for the good of the common cause.

SERENA tries to draw nearer to ALYOSHA.

ALYOSHA (leaping up onto the dais): I shall go myself to the bourgeoisie! Here within me, without respite, rages an ideological soul…(To STERVETSEN) What will you give the Soviet Socialist Republic for our superstructure?

YEVSEI: How much cash will you pay for the production of a revolution?

SERENA: Alyosha, a zeppelin!

ALYOSHA (now happy): A zeppelin! On it the proletariat will ascend high above the entire indigent earth! For such a machine I am ready to perish in Europe!

STERVETSEN: But I don’t understand…

SERENA: Papa, Alyosha loves me…

OPORNYKH: Well, er…A zeppelin is just what we need for packaging.49 We’ve got no barrels.

GODOVALOV: My own opinion is that, in exchange for our Soviet soul, we should purchase horse-drawn transport.

ONE OF THE MEMBERS: What do we want with an idea? We became conscious of everything long ago. A worldwide question is empty piffle.

MIUD: But what about me, Alyosha? Who will I be left with? Opportunism will be the death of me.

ALYOSHA: Don’t worry, Miud. I’ll liquidate it straightaway. Kuzma!

KUZMA (from the thick of the assembly): Yeah?

ALYOSHA: Do you want to meet your end forever?

KUZMA: I want peace. Everyone likes the dead.

ALYOSHA leads KUZMA out in front of the assembly. He takes from his pocket a monkey wrench, a screwdriver, and some other tools. He unscrews KUZMA’s head and tosses it aside.

OPORNYKH: I’ll just take this head—I could make it into a soup bowl. (Takes KUZMA’s head.)

ALYOSHA removes from KUZMA’s chest a primus stove, a radio, and other everyday objects. Then he separates the entire torso into a number of pieces—KUZMA’s constituent elements crash to the ground and five-kopeck pieces scatter everywhere. From the very depth of the perished iron body comes a cloud of yellow smoke. A heap of scrap metal is left on the floor. Everyone watches the cloud of yellow smoke as it slowly dissipates.

MIUD (looking at the smoke): Alyosha, what is all this?

ALYOSHA: Exhaust fumes. Opportunism.

MIUD (melancholically): Let it go to waste then. It’s no good for breathing.

STERVETSEN: I regret the demise of citizen Kuzma. We in Europe have need of an iron spirit.

KLOKOTOV comes out with a sack and packs away the remains of KUZMA.

ALYOSHA: No need to miss him, learned person. I could make iron out of you too.

STERVETSEN: I am far from objecting.

SHCHOEV: Opornykh! Petya!

OPORNYKH: That’s me, Ignat Nikanorovich!

SHCHOEV: Take Kuzma to the district salvage heap, to be credited to the account of our Plan.

OPORNYKH: Straightaway, Ignat Nikanorovich! (Now on official business, he rushes off.)

SHCHOEV (to ALYOSHA): And as for you, dear comrade—you’ve been inventing opportunists, have you? Trying to spoil and corrupt our mass?

ALYOSHA: Yes, well I…Comrade Shchoev…I inadvertently…I wanted to create a hero, but he broke…

SHCHOEV: He broke?! What difference does that make? Submit a statement in acknowledgment of your error. But declare your own statement to be clearly inadequate and confess yourself a class enemy.

YEVSEI: Yes, yes…I like that! A broken hero! As if a hero can break!

ALYOSHA bows his head sorrowfully.

MIUD: Don’t cry, Alyosha. Just close your eyes tight and I will lead you to socialism as if you were blind. And you and I will be on our own together again, singing in the collective farms about the Five-Year Plan, about shock workers, about all that lies in our hearts.

ALYOSHA: No, I created an opportunist. My soul now aches with sorrow.

YEVSEI: Submit a statement. Write that you now feel mute anguish.

SHCHOEV: Acknowledge your fault. It will ease the burden.

A MEMBER: Death to the traitor who has betrayed the interests of our social stratum.

FIRST FEMALE OFFICE WORKER: This is terrible! This unofficial musician has turned out to be a compromiser and an appeaser, a simplifier who has cheapened our ideology! Do you understand?

Conversation among the assembly:

—What a nightmare! I told you there would be a foreign intervention…

—His documents! Verify his documents! Grab him by the document!

—Surround them with an invincible unity of ranks!

—This is a cardinal error of principle—he must renounce his disgraceful ways!

—Give him a good slap, whoever’s closest!

—He’s a saboteur, he wants to wreck our class apparatus!

—Fascist! Let me have a go at him! Give me the face of the class enemy!

—Here within us rages a lofty hatred. And—above all—it rages within a common breast!

—We’ll have some fun with you now, you mother’s son!

—Life in our office has become so interesting now. We well and truly tremble with feelings!

—All artillery circle members, this way!

—Seren, what’s going on in here? I’m once again in a state of perplexity.

—Oh, Papa, this is an impetuous welling up of intrigue and machination.

—We-ell now, what’s the word…Alyosha, you’re a shithead!

—And all the time, you know, absolutely all the time, even when I was having the abortion—all the time I had a feeling that something at work wasn’t right…I even said this to the doctor during the operation—I was surprised at myself!

—Oh I love these moments of danger!

—You’re a nice person. Only toward women are you capable of acting vilely.

—And certainly not toward the state!

—An enterprise of shame should be organized for the traitors!

—Ah, let him have it, let him have it, let him have it hard! We’ll have fun with you now, you sons of bitches!

—Now, comrades, it is necessary to close our ranks!

—Keep a watchful eye on one another!

—Let none of you, ever, trust yourselves!

—Consider yourself a saboteur, for the sake of the work!

—Chastise yourselves on your days off!

—More torment, more gnawings of conscience, more anguish with regard to the class, comrades!

—Up to the highest level!

—Hurrah!

SHCHOEV: Silence, elemental masses!

Silence sets in. ALYOSHA stands surrounded by universal hostility; he is in anguish, entirely lost. He has no idea how to live further.

SHCHOEV (with sangfroid): It will be enough if this man repents in writing of his delusion of heart.

YEVSEI: What matters is that we receive from him a proper document, everything according to protocol. That’s all there is to it. In accord with the document, he will then be corrected automatically!

SHCHOEV: You’re right, Yevsei! (Pensively) A document…Such depth of thought in a single word! An eternal memorial to the thoughts of humanity!

ALYOSHA: I was an uncollectivized proprietor of my own talent…

YEVSEI: You are a gift of God—but there is no God…

ALYOSHA: Why didn’t I become iron? Then I would have been true to you forever.

YEVSEI: You lack firmness and were tormented by tenderness.

ALYOSHA: You are right on every count! And I myself am nothing, I no longer exist in this organized world.

YEVSEI: You lacked discipline and your hard line has shattered.

ALYOSHA: I thought whatever came into my head. I’m uncultured, and my feelings roamed in all directions, and I often wept just from sad music.

SHCHOEV: You invented things without leadership, and your objects functioned the wrong way around. Where were you earlier? I’d have taken charge of you!

ALYOSHA: I acknowledge myself to be a double-dealer, a mistaker, and compromiser, as well as being a mechanistic materialist…But don’t believe me…Maybe I am the mask of the class enemy! Your thoughts are precise and rare, you are members of great intelligence. But I thought boring things about you, that you were plodding along on a wave of impetuous spontaneity, that you were a tribe of bureaucrats, shitheads, agents of kulakdom, of Fascism itself. Now I see that I was an opportunist and I am sorrowful in my mind.

MIUD: Alyosha! I’m all alone now! (Turns away from everyone and covers her face with her hands.)

SHCHOEV: It’s all right, Alyosha. We’ll bring you back to reason.

SERENA: Papa, what is happening here? Alyosha, don’t be afraid!

STERVETSEN (to SHCHOEV and YEVSEI): This psychology (he points to ALYOSHA) is unacceptable. This is defective goods, not a proper superstructure. Only ardent, selfless heroes are of use to us. I reject this reject!

YEVSEI: You’ve brought us into deficit, Alyosha!

ALYOSHA: I’m a pitiful and deluded stray—while you are leaders…

SHCHOEV: We are not blind to that fact. We lead and we come to conclusions.

MIUD: What’s come over you, Alyosha?

ALYOSHA: I am submitting to the facts, Miud.

MIUD: Why did you allow this vile social stratum to frighten you? Without you I will be an orphan. I cannot lift the hurdy-gurdy by myself, nor can I walk alone in such heat all the way to socialism!…Alyosha, Comrade Alyosha!

ALYOSHA weeps. Everyone is silent.

SHCHOEV: His tenderness is creeping out. You can see it all over him now. He couldn’t save it up for the future, the bastard!

MIUD pulls out the revolver from beneath her shirt. She points the barrel at SHCHOEV and YEVSEI.

MIUD: End now!

YEVSEI immediately weeps, silently and copiously; his whole face is covered with flowing moisture. SHCHOEV looks at YEVSEI and MIUD in disbelief.

OPORNYKH: Er…Yevsei Ivanovich, are those really tears? You’ve never before been able to weep.

MIUD: End now! You will torment socialism! Better that I should put an end to your torments now!

SHCHOEV: Right away, Comrade Woman. Give me a piece of paper—I’ll write a statement renouncing my errors.

YEVSEI (in a worthless, childish voice): We’ve run out of ink, Ignat Nikanorovich. Ask the young woman citizen to wait a minute. We’ll give her a receipt agreeing to be ended…

SHCHOEV: I want something sad, Alyosha. Play a march for us.

MIUD: Hurry up. My hand is worn out.

SHCHOEV: Yevsei, support the citizen’s hand.

YEVSEI hurls himself at MIUD. She fires at him. YEVSEI falls and lies motionless. MIUD points the revolver at SHCHOEV. The assembly instinctively takes a step toward MIUD.

MIUD: Stay where you are. We don’t have time to be digging graves.

The assembly freezes.

SHCHOEV: On behalf of our members, I express our gratitude to the comrade woman for the death of this (pointing at YEVSEI) secret reptile.

MIUD (to SHCHOEV): I haven’t given you the floor.

SHCHOEV: I beg your pardon. But please allow me then to feel a little sadness…Alyosha, put forth something by way of a musical tune.

OPORNYKH: Right away, Ignat Nikanorovich! Where is that…that…er, whatchamacallit? (Disappears, then reappears with the hurdy-gurdy, which he carries over to ALYOSHA.) Please, for God’s sake!

YEVSEI (lying down): Somehow, Ignat Nikanorovich, I just can’t manage to end.

SHCHOEV: Easy does it, Yevsei. Don’t hurry—you’ll find a way. What is it? Don’t you feel like dying?

YEVSEI: Given that I’m a reptile, Ignat Nikanorovich, I don’t have much choice. But watch out you don’t feel bored without me.

SHCHOEV: We won’t, Yevsei. Alyosha, give us something with a tune. (ALYOSHA quietly begins to turn his music. It plays a sad little tune, then quiets a little, now barely audible.) Somehow I’m feeling pitiful again. Citizen woman, let me at least write a statement to the effect that I sympathize with everything.

YEVSEI sighs loudly on the floor.

FIRST FEMALE OFFICE WORKER: Yevsei Ivanovich is sighing.

YEVSEI: Without me—I warn you—there will be a holdup in construction.

OPORNYKH: What’s up with him? Already killed, yet he sympathizes…

MIUD: My hand’s worn out. I’m going to shoot this minute.

ALYOSHA (singing along with his music):

Along the merry path of labor

Shoeless we plod on our bare feet.

MIUD: Not that song, Alyosha. Not that one, you reptile! Your road now is neither rough nor joyful. Sing this one…(The music falls silent. MIUD drops the revolver and sings alone, amid total silence.)

Who will open a door to me—

Some alien beast or bird?

Where have you gone, my comrade?

No word—I hear no word.

YEVSEI (from the floor): Perhaps I could be your comrade. I could become a shock worker, I could enlist among the enthusiasts and be endowed with zeal for the rest of the age! I will organize packaging!

The assembly joins in the song and sings along with the hurdy-gurdy:

Where have you gone, my comrade?

No word—I hear no word.

SHCHOEV (weeping through his horn-rimmed glasses): I want to end.

In the distance—the noise of birds and of rushing water. The sputter of a motorcycle. In runs the AGENT from the state farm.

STATE COLLECTIVE FARM AGENT: Mobilize the masses for me, on the double. I am chasing birds and fish back into the economy! But what’s up with you?

SHCHOEV: Have no fear of difficulties, comrade! Chase them back on your own!

AGENT: Huh?

YEVSEI: Maybe this is something I could do? Animals are afraid of me.

MIUD: Run along then.

YEVSEI leaps briskly to his feet and runs off. The AGENT disappears after him.

OPORNYKH: Those who have been killed make even more of an effort. Now there’s a…oh, what’s the word…Party line for you.

STERVETSEN: Citizens of the district, I am overwhelmed by the presence of your spirit. I highly value your transient passer-by girl, Miud!

SHCHOEV: So why aren’t you killing me, girl? Feeble-powered creature! Are you afraid of my manly courage? (Pensively) Courage! I love my personality for that quality!…Fire away, murderess!

MIUD: I no longer feel like it. I’m afraid of overstepping into extremism.

SERENA: Papa, won’t you buy Alyosha now?

STERVETSEN: No, Seren, he’s degenerated…

The assembly gradually settles down for the night—on the floor or on items of office inventory. MIUD takes the hurdy-gurdy from ALYOSHA and, with difficulty, carries it on her back to the door. She stops by the door and looks around the office. Everyone looks at her vigilantly…

ALYOSHA: Good-bye, Miud!

MIUD: Good-bye, you compromising reptile! (The supine assembly raises its hands to salute the girl as she leaves. MIUD brandishes a fist at the assembly and smiles) Pah! Dregs of the grass roots! (Opens the door.)

STERVETSEN (rises from the floor and rushes toward MIUD): Listen to me, small lady…Allow me to acquire you for Europe. It’s you who are the superstructure! (MIUD laughs.) But I beg you. You are the mind and heart of all the districts of our earth. The West will fall in love with you.

MIUD (seriously): No, I don’t need love. I have love of my own.

STERVETSEN: May I inquire—who is it there in your breast?

MIUD: Comrade Stalin.

THE ASSEMBLY (almost in one voice): We salute you.

STERVETSEN: But your state needs zeppelins, and we could give you a whole squadron of them…

OPORNYKH: Take them, girl!

MIUD: Somehow I don’t feel like it. For now we’re going to live on foot.

STERVETSEN (bowing): That is a great pity.

MIUD: Ask the proletariat of your own district.

STERVETSEN: I thank you.

MIUD leaves. Silence.

SHCHOEV (sighs): Oh Lord, how much longer?

OPORNYKH (who is lying down, amid the assembly): Er, er, what’s your name, Ignat Nikanorovich…who will give comfort to us now?

SHCHOEV: Oh, Petya, Petya, what I want now is sadness…Everything became clear to me long ago, and what I’m drawn to now is something or other indefinite.

KLOKOTOV: Comrade Shchoev, let us, please, get on with current business. Members, after all, can get exhausted too. We have to get up early tomorrow—to fulfill the Plan.

FIRST FEMALE OFFICE WORKER: Oh no, what are you saying? It’s far too interesting for us here. We love overcoming difficulties.

STERVETSEN (his face turning crimson with anger): Deceivers, grasping self-servers, eulogizers of the status quo, impetuous drifters…You have only circulars, your lines are not clear and hard. You have no superstructure—you are opportunists! Take your references (takes papers from his pocket and hurls them into space). Take your paragraphs and punctilios—give me back my suits, my shirts, my glasses, and all my other belongings!

SERENA: And my blouses, my brassieres, my stockings, and overalls!

STERVETSEN and SERENA rush at SHCHOEV and KLOKOTOV and rip their former clothing from them.

KLOKOTOV (to the FEMALE OFFICE WORKER): Listen, didn’t you exchange a copy of the prospective plan for a foreign girdle?

FIRST FEMALE OFFICE WORKER: I did…But you seized it from me and took it away to your spouse. You said she had been born on that day forty years before. Remember?

KLOKOTOV: I forgot.

SHCHOEV is already minus his jacket, vest, and glasses, all of which SERENA has managed to tear off him. Meanwhile, STERVETSEN has stripped KLOKOTOV almost to the skin. As things are taken off him, SHCHOEV indifferently peruses one of the papers tossed away by STERVETSEN.

SHCHOEV: Stop, citizens. It seems we no longer exist. (General attention. Everyone lying on the floor stands up. SHCHOEV reads) “As of this April your Sandy Ravine Cooperative System is scheduled for liquidation. The delivery of manufactured goods, as well as of grain and fodder, is hereby terminated. The reason: the above-mentioned inhabited locality is to be removed, in order to facilitate industrial exploitation of the subsoil, which contains deposits of carbon monoxide.” (To the assembly) I don’t understand. How come we’ve kept on being, when we haven’t existed for a long time?

KLOKOTOV: So, Ignat Nikanorovich, it seems we’ve been breathing carbon monoxide! What do you make of that? Do we exist because of consciousness, or because of carbon monoxide?

SHCHOEV (pensively): Carbon monoxide! So there we are—the objective cause of the district population’s lack of consciousness.

GODOVALOV: And what about us, Ignat Nikanorovich? What are we going to do now? People say that objective causes do not exist—only subjects…

SHCHOEV: No objects, you say? Go and organize a self-criticism session then, if you’re a subject.

GODOVALOV: Right away, Ignat Nikanorovich. (Bustles about.)

The sound of axes. Several logs from the back wall of the office (from the audience’s perspective) tumble to the ground. Two workers can be seen in the gap, working away. Another part of the wall collapses. The assembly lies down, except for STERVETSEN and SERENA, who remain standing, clutching their bundles of recovered clothing.

ONE OF THE WORKERS (positions the teeth of a crane beneath the upper part of the office and shouts): Take it up now! (To the assembly) We were told that this whole area had been cleared out long ago and that there was no one here. You were blocking the whole of our path…

The upper part of the office vanishes upward; the remnants of the walls tumble down. The world’s emptiness—an endless country landscape—becomes visible. Pause. Then, from far away, the sound of the hurdy-gurdy. No longer visible, already on her way, MIUD is playing. The music is solemn; it touches a human being’s bored and weary heart.

MIUD (sings in the distance):

They set off on foot

For a faraway land,

Leaving their motherland

For a freedom unknown.

Strangers to everyone,

No comrade but the wind—

In their breast their heart

Beats without reply.

SHCHOEV’s belly starts to rumble and he rubs it in the hope of extinguishing the sounds. The assembly lies there in silence, facedown on the floor. STERVETSEN and SERENA stand amid a liquidated, demolished office.

SERENA: Papa, what is all this?

STERVETSEN: The superstructure of the soul, Seren, over weeping Europe.

The End

Written October–November 1930

Translated by Susan Larsen in 1989 and revised by Robert Chandler and Jesse Irwin in 2016