The Case of Comrade Tulayev Read Online Free PDF Page B

synthesis is exactly the limitation of Koestler’s chamber drama, which is both political argument and psychological portrait. An entire era is seen through the prism of one person’s ordeal of confinement and interrogation, interspersed with passages of recollection; flashbacks. The novel opens with Rubashov, ex-Commissar of the People, being pushed into his cell and the door slamming behind him, and ends with the executioner arriving with the handcuffs, the descent to the prison cellar, and the bullet in the back of the head. (It is not surprising that Darkness at Noon could be made into a Broadway play.) The revelation of how — that is, by what arguments rather than by physical torture — Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, Bukharin, and the other ruling members of the Bolshevik elite could be induced to confess to the absurd charges of treason brought against them is the story of Darkness at Noon .
    Serge’s polyphonic novel, with its many trajectories, has a much more complicated view of character, of the interweaving of politics and private life, and of the terrible procedures of Stalin’s inquisition. And it casts a much wider intellectual net. (An example: Rublev’s analysis of the revolutionary generation.) Of those arrested, all but one will eventually confess — Ryzhik, who remains defiant, prefers to go on a hunger strike and die — but only one resembles Koestler’s Rubashov: Erchov, who is persuaded to render one last service to the Party by admitting that he was part of the conspiracy to assassinate Tulayev. “Every Man Has His Own Way of Drowning” is the title of one of the chapters.
    The Case of Comrade Tulayev is a far less conventional novel than are Darkness at Noon and 1984 , whose portraits of totalitarianism have proved so unforgettable — perhaps because those novels have a single protagonist and tell a single story. One need not think of either Koestler’s Rubashov or Orwell’s Winston Smith as a hero; the fact that both novels stay with their protagonists from beginning to end forces the reader’s identification with the archetypal victim of totalitarian tyranny. If Serge’s novel can be said to have a hero, it is someone, present only in the first and last chapters, who is not a victim: Kostia, the actual assassin of Tulayev, who remains unsuspected.
    Murder, killing is in the air. It is what history is about. A Colt revolver is bought from a shady purveyor — for no particular reason, except that it is a magical object, bluish-black steel, and feels potent concealed in the pocket. One day, its purchaser, the insignificant Romachkin, a miserable soul and also (in his own eyes) “a pure man whose one thought was justice,” is walking near the Kremlin wall at the moment when a uniformed figure, “his uniform bare of insignia, his face hard, bristlingly mustached, and inconceivably sensual,” emerges, followed by two men in civilian clothes, a mere thirty feet away, then stops six feet away to light a pipe, and Romachkin realizes he has been presented with an opportunity to shoot Stalin (“the Chief”) himself. He doesn’t. Disgusted by his own cowardice, he gives the gun away to Kostia, who, out on a snowy night, observes a stout man in a fur-lined coat and astrakhan cap with a briefcase under his arm getting out of a powerful black car that has just pulled up in front of a private residence, hears him addressed by the chauffeur as Comrade Tulayev — Tulayev of the Central Committee, Kostia realizes, he of “the mass deportations” and “the university purges” — sees him sending the car away (in fact, Tulayev does not intend to enter his house but to continue on foot to a sexual assignation), at which moment, as if in a trance, a fit of absence, the gun comes out of Kostia’s pocket. The gun explodes, a sudden clap of thunder in a dead silence. Tulayev falls to the sidewalk. Kostia