Two boats cross a lake north of Petrograd on a pale night in July 1917. In the first sits a man of forty-seven who has worked out that he cannot see the far shore and may as well close his eyes. In the second sits his companion, watching, who has begun to imagine the first boat drifting towards a chasm and wants to shout Stop. The first man is Lenin. The second is Grigori Zinoviev. Later, in the hut in the hayfield, Lenin asks him "Shall we go to sleep, Grigori?", hears about the blister he got from wrapping his foot-cloths badly, and tells him the moon has seen everything there is to see. Count the names in this volume. Zinoviev 111 times. Kamenev twice. Stalin twice, once of them a city. Trotsky not once. This is a book printing a novella in which a man shot after the first Moscow trial of 1936 appears more than a hundred times as Lenin's friend-published in 1978, ten years before those sentences were annulled, with no line of apparatus anywhere to tell a foreign reader that the name had ever been a problem. Four works, including Star, which is as good as its reputation. Prefaced by Alexander Tvardovsky's obituary essay of 1962, reprinted unaltered sixteen years later by people who had won the argument he lost. Progress Publishers, Soviet Authors Library, 1978. Translated by Robert Daglish, Leonard Stoklitsky, Fainna Glagoleva and Ralph Parker. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
