Friday, and my Russian series piece is due up on Tuesday. I promised in ever such a carefree manner that this week I would write about Trotsky. Should be simple enough, right, writing about what you know?
[insert slightly hysterical laugh here]
Well, one thing is for sure: I won’t be writing about Trotsky the Commissar of War, or Trotsky the theorist, or even Trotsky the literary critic (although I will, at some point, look at Literature and Revolution). This is going to be Trotsky the author, in all his florid, metaphor laden, self-regarding glory. Perhaps I should even do a piece on his legendary wit; I was going to say wit and wisdom, but dismissing all his potential allies in a series of burning one-liners wasn’t a very wise decision in the longer term.
On a very much related point, I just discovered this piece from the Hoover digest:
Verbatim transcripts of Politburo discussions! Verbal battles between Trotsky and Stalin! And all to appear in three volumes this very year! Oh, nice people at Yale University Press, if you would but send me a copy of that three-set volume in Russian (to review, of course), you would make an impoverished student of Trotsky very, very happy.
