A DESCENT INTO THE HELL OF HATE AND LIES

THE RED CLOWN YEGVENI CHIRICOV 1864-1932

I used to go back and forth every Saturday to the Riudavets stall on Cuesta Moyano, where I would load up my bag of out-of-print books and dreams.

This week I was rereading The Red Clown by Eugene Chirikov and I came face to face with a prophetic novel, dealing with the suffering of the Russian people, their strength, their deep faith in Christ. Scenes described with an illuminated glow, it was a descent into hell.

In one of the ergastulas of the Cheka the poor people await to be shot. Reds and Whites, who brought so much hate?

Captain Alexander Nicolaevich Musayev, hero of the Russian-Japanese war and decorated on the German front, is a hero. He had graduated as a lieutenant from the Frunze military academy.

He was the illegitimate son of a high-ranking figure in the Tsar's court and one of his domestics. He would bear the stigma all his life. When the revolution broke out, he joined the Bolsheviks and shot and imprisoned his fellow soldiers.

Some asked to be taken to the firing squad, wearing his epaulettes and the St. George's laurel.

Within the Red Army he was considered one of its top leaders. He was implacable with those loyal to the old regime.

A new era had dawned. Museyev had loved Elena, an aristocratic wife of a general who had died in combat, who left him to go with another, Captain Cordlitsky.

In the cells of the NKVD, a crowd of bourgeois people were crowded together waiting to be taken to the firing squad. They were shot by starting the engines of the trucks so that their moans would not alarm the population.

There were old men, women and children. Comrade Museyev sends them to the gallows without any mercy.

In one of the corners of these torture chambers lies a very beautiful lady with distinguished gestures despite her rags. It is Elena.

Her former lover recognizes her and shows himself willing to sacrifice himself by giving her and her former lover Cordlitsky a license to flee to Crimea and from there to Turkey.

However, the latter, brought to testify before the Cheka, takes off his epaulettes and to save his skin says that the Tsar was a criminal and that he never loved Elena, who was a worldly woman, one of his many flirtations at the imperial court.

The countess who attends the interrogation from behind a curtain faints (to save her the commissioner had kidnapped her and taken her to his house in Moscow where she is assisted by her elderly mother) and realizes that the true love of her life was Museyev.

Here is the crux of the plot of The Red Clown – Krasnii Siatogov – a Greek tragedy drama that, when I reread it on this June night, made me cry.

Elena and Musayev embrace, spend a night of love and, when the deception is discovered by the NKVD spies, they are shot. Labor omnia vincit, according to the evangelical maxim. Love conquers all.

Its strength is divine because on earth it is the arm of God. Chirikov, who was related to the revolutionaries and was a friend of Gorki and Andreiev, disheartened by the ravages and crimes of the revolution, whose leaders were mostly Jews, flees abroad.

He died in Hungary in 1932. Today my conscience was assaulted by a messianic idea: if Russia did not exist, it would have to be invented. It will once again defeat its enemies for the good of humanity.