It came to my attention in Russia by Antony Beevor, a British military historian whom I have followed since he wrote the astonishing Stalingrad, the story of the Devil’s apprentice that he quotes from Sentimental Journey by Viktor Shklovsky. In the story, to reforge the old man into a young one, the Devil’s apprentice needs to set the old man on fire. Leave the old and embrace the new. After the fire, the Devil’s apprentice tries to perform the miracle. And he finds out that could not revive the old man. How could that be that age and wisdom also in turn carry gullibility and poor choices?
With this simple folk tale, Antony Beevor summarizes the Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent Civil War, a conflict that would be embellished and sold as propaganda that millions of desperate and poor people bought without questioning. One can be proud of posing as a communist without considering the massive killing, the millions disappeared where nobody could find their bones.
That was Lenin’s idea to reforge the Russian people. But he never thought about the raging fire that unfolded for five long years and left him consumed by a stroke. And looking forward to seeing how Trotsky or Stalin would conduct their fight for absolute power. Stalin won always surrounded by paranoia and the never-ending need to purge his old comrades, citizens, and so many generals that Hitler mistakenly believed he could win.
These days some people are celebrating the century of Lenin’s passing. His embalmed body is in Moscow’s Red Square like a touristic attraction inside a mausoleum in red granite, the mineral I found close to a basilic of Barcelona, in a minuscule square where the rebels against a new and corrupted French dynasty are buried, the same dynasty of idiotic kings that later on sold half of the US to the French revolutionaries for peanuts, and then Napoleon to President Monroe for fifteen millions of dollars. After that, the rest of the Spanish Empire went down the drain.
Today, I read in a nationalistic digital outlet about the red granite, and it’s Ukrainian, from the quarry of Slynka. And this red granite is called Kapuscinki. So, the nationalistic horde is proud because they have something in common with Lenin’s mausoleum. I hope they don’t try to reforge Barcelona as well, now that it’s already so populated for American ex-pats and European tourists that the rents went up, and with miser salaries, the Barcelonians must leave the city by droves and move into cheaper places, like the boring beach towns.
And back again to the Devil’s apprentice, I have read something similar in Faust by Wolfgang Goethe –which is mandatory to fully understand the literary idiom “to strike a Faustian bargain”– where Faust calls the real Devil sick of being alone between books. In exchange for his terrenal soul, the Devil promises Faust to be the wiser of the men and also mundane pleasures during the Walpurgis Night, the Northern European festivity of witches and telluric icons.
That Walpurgis Night always fascinated me when I was young, so I decided to include it on my first novel, not because I was trying a devilish topic. It is the last evening of April. And when I was writing on my word processor, before the internet was up and running, my lovely landlady shouted at me in fear across the courtyard because the paragraph I was writing was on her television. I guess there was an electrical explanation for that. But it was the Walpurgis Night and I wanted to believe in magic.