recite Walt Whitman. He talked endlessly about the Georgian poets of his childhood, and he himself helped edit a Russian translation of Rustaveli’s
Stalin respected artistic talent, generally preferring to kill Party hacks instead of brilliant poets. Hence on Mandelstam’s arrest Stalin ordered, “Isolate but preserve.” He would preserve most of his geniuses, such as Shostakovich, Bulgakov and Eisenstein, sometimes telephoning and encouraging them, at other times denouncing and impoverishing them. When he called Pasternak in one of his telephonic lightning-strikes from Olympus, he asked about Mandelstam: “He’s a genius, isn’t he?” Mandelstam’s tragedy was sealed not only by his suicidal decision to mock Stalin in verse—the medium of the dictator’s own childhood dreams—but also by Pasternak’s failure to assert that his colleague was indeed a genius. Mandelstam was not sentenced to death, but nor was he preserved, perishing on the dystopian road to Gulag hell. But Stalin did preserve Pasternak: “Leave that cloud-dweller in peace.”
The seminary’s priest-poet of seventeen never publicly acknowledged his poems, but he later told a friend, “I lost interest in writing poetry because it requires one’s entire attention—a hell of a lot of patience. And in those days I was like quicksilver”—the quicksilver of revolution and conspiracy that was now flashing through the youth of Tiflis and into the seminary.{60}
When he stood on the white steps of the Stone Sack, Soso could see the bustling but dangerous Persian and Armenian Bazaars around Yerevan Square, “a network of narrow lanes and alleys” with “open workshops of goldsmiths and armourers; stalls of pastry cooks and bakers with flat loaves baked in huge clay ovens… cobblers displaying gaudy slippers… and wine-merchants’ shops where the wine is kept in sheep or buffalo skins with the fur inside.”[30] Golovinsky Boulevard was almost Parisian; the rest more resembled “Lima or Bombay.”
“The streets,” reports Baedeker,
are generally steep and so narrow that two carriages cannot pass, the houses, mostly adorned with balconies, perched one above the other on the mountainside like steps of a staircase. From sunrise to sunset, the streets are crowded with a motley throng of men and animals… the Georgian dealers in vegetables with large wooden trays on their heads, the Persians in long caftans and high black fur caps, often with red-dyed hair and fingernails; the Tartar
A city of hot sulphur springs (and famous bathhouses), it was built right on the slopes of Holy Mountain and on the banks of the Kura River beneath the round-spired Georgian church and sombre towers of the fortress-prison of Metekhi, which Iremashvili called the “Bastille of Tiflis.” High, up cobbled lanes on Holy Mountain, stood the white marble church (where Keke today lies buried among poets and princes), radiant and pristine.
Tiflis was a city of 160,000–30 percent Russians, 30 percent Armenians and 26 per cent Georgians, with the rest a smattering of Jews, Persians and Tartars. There were six Armenian newspapers, five Russian and four Georgian. Tiflis’s workers mainly laboured in the railway depot and small workshops; its rich and powerful were Armenian tycoons, Georgian princes, and Russian bureaucrats and generals who converged on the court of the Emperor’s viceroy. Its water-carriers were from Racha, in the west, its stonemasons Greek, its tailors Jewish, its bathkeepers Persian. It was like “a porridge of people and beasts, sheepskin hats and shaved heads, fezzes and peaked caps… horses and mules, camels, and dogs… All shout, bang, laugh, swear, jostle, sing… in the burning air.”
This cosmopolitan imperial city of theatres, hotels, caravanserai, bazaars and brothels already vibrated with Georgian nationalism and international Marxism, which were seeping dangerously into the closed cloisters of the seminary.{61}
Soso and another boy, Said Devdariani, were moved out of their dormitory into a smaller room “because of our poor health.” Devdariani was older, already a member of a secret circle at which the boys gathered to read forbidden socialist literature. “I suggested he join,” says Devdariani, “and he was delighted—he agreed.” There Stalin met up with his friends from Gori, Iremashvili and Davitashvili.
At first the books were hardly incendiary works of Marxist conspiracy but the sort of harmless books banned by the seminary. The boys joined a forbidden book club called the Cheap Library and started to get other books from a bookshop run by a former
At night, Black Spot patrolled the corridors, constantly checking that the lights were out and that there was no reading—or other self-indulgent vices. As soon as he was gone, the boys lit candles and started reading again. Soso, typically, “overdid it and hardly slept at all, looking bleary-eyed and ill. When he started coughing,” Iremashvili “took the book out of his hand and blew out the candle.”
Inspector Father Germogen caught Stalin with Hugo’s
Young Stalin was even more influenced by Russian writers who caused a sensation among radical youth: the poems of Nikolai Nekrasov and the novel by Chernyshevsky,
Soon Stalin was caught reading another forbidden book “on the school stairs” for which he received, “on the Rector’s order, a prolonged stay in the punishment cell and severe reprimand.” He “worshipped Zola,” his favourite of the Parisian’s novels being
Hugo was not the only writer who changed Stalin’s life: another novelist changed his name. He read Alexander Kazbegi’s forbidden novel
“Koba became Soso’s God and gave his life meaning,” says Iremashvili. “He wished to become Koba. He called himself ‘Koba’ and insisted we call him that. His face shone with pride and pleasure when we called him ‘Koba.’” The name meant a lot to Stalin—the vengeance of the Caucasus mountain peoples, the ruthlessness of the bandit, the obsession with loyalty and betrayal, and the sacrifice of person and family for a cause. It was a name he already loved: his “substitute father” Egnatashvili’s first name was Koba, short for Yakov. “Koba” became a favourite
His poems were already appearing in the newspapers but at seventeen, in the autumn of 1896, Stalin started to lose interest in priestly studies and even in poetry. In his year, he slipped from fifth to sixteenth.
