Trafika Europe 13 - Russian Ballet

A Light in the Night

He laughed himself, sobbing, all the way to tears, hiccups and cramps in the stomach. Then he stopped and froze. He’d cry, if he knew how. Other old men, he knew, cried quite frequently, but he had led a dry existence. Even faced with the welded-shut zinc coffin in which they brought Ilusha home he could not shed a single tear. Though they say he who cries has an easier life. Not to mention an easier death. Ilya Ilych shook his head, squeezed his eyes shut, refusing to look upon the surrounding absurdity, and groaned through clenched teeth. His long standing sense of irony was of no use to him now, and he had no strength left for hysteria. Just lie down and die, if you please. – I am coming! I am coming!.. – came a beckoning call from somewhere close by. Ilya Ilych looked up and saw a man running toward him, kicking up clouds of the grey stuff. He ran as if upon good pavement, not sinking at all, and his entire look was utterly old-fashioned and cinematic. Ilya Ilych had seen attire like this only in the earliest, snot-nosed years of his childhood, and even then only on aging dandies that brought out their NEP-era 5 outfits from their mothball-filled wardrobes in the early days of spring. And also on the movie screen, of course. 5 NEP, or New Economic Policy, was the communist version of a market econo- my, introduced by Lenin in 1922, and subsequently abolished by Stalin in 1928. The period introduced NEPmen, a new class of nouveau-riche Russians that benefited from the limited allowance of private enterprise under NEP.

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