WRITERS IN EXILE
519
a big antireligious museum, as has happened with us in Russia.
This, of course, they did not like, and it created a scandal.
Another year .. . Naples. Evening in Naples. We were wan–
dering along some small crooked streets, filled with vegetables,
fish stands, garbage. Children were yelling, women were shout–
ing to one another from windows along the narrow streets. Meat
was cooking, car horns were honking, small cars with broken
headlights maneuvered desperately along the picturesque labyr–
inth. Freshly washed linen flapped in the sky at every floor, on
every street. Walking very coolly down the center of one street was
a chicken, tied by the leg on a long string to a lamp post. Sudden–
ly we look, and there they are-our own Lenin and Stalin, so fam–
iliar from childhood, sitting beside one another on a bench with
happy faces. They're smiling at us from a huge poster. Just like in
Moscow thirty years ago. About this once popular photograph,
memorable to all Soviet people, evil tongues said that it was only
a photomontage, done in order to turn Stalin into the best friend
and true comrade-in-arms of Lenin. Then it vanished from the
scene; they hid Stalin somewhere, only Lenin remained. And here
they sit again together, on the same bench, and smile, and-for–
give me-look at us tenderly from the wall of an Italian house.
Above them on the
post~r
was written "Long live Stalin! Long
live the dictatorship of the Proletariat!"
Keeping with the degradation in present-day Russia, where
the dictatorship of the proletariat has been replaced by social im–
perialism, the figure and deeds of Stalin are ever increasingly
ennobled, and something else threatening, dictatorial. For some
reason, behind this enthusiasm of young leftist Italians, I could
hear the enthusiastic roar of the crowd in honor of Benito Musso–
lini. But meanwhile, Lenin and Stalin smiled beatifically at us
from the poster, promising us Communism with a human face.
When we find ourselves in the West, at first it seems to us
that everything has died. The West is so weak in comparison with
the Soviet regime. In the West we feel like guests from the future ,
and we want to prophesy. After all, we already know how things
will end. We picture free Europe as a small peninsula of the
colossal Communist continent of Eurasia, which has attacked
from the East-not to mention the Soviet outposts in other parts
of the world. Truly, the entire political geography changed
