A Russian Dust-Up Over Poetry *

Two guys are drinking vodka in an ice-fishing hut in Novosibirsk, Siberia. The cast iron, pot-bellied stove hums away in the corner, a domesticated volcano of heat. The men are in shirt sleeves, sweating from both the drink and the heat as sub-zero winds howl outside through the pines. A wolf sends up a lonely and plaintive cry in the distance.

"Prose is the only real literature," Igor says to his drunken mate, Ivan. He is thinking of his kind and generous prose-loving mother and his critical, emotionally unavailable poetry-quoting father.

The hut goes unnaturally silent as the words sink in. Ivan, an unrepentant poet, retired sharp-shooter, ex literature teacher simmers on his fishing stool.

"What's that you said?" asks Ivan. "I'm not sure I caught your last sentence." His eyes are red, his gaze suddenly hard as the tungsten being mined in the nearby mountains.

"I said, prose is the only real literature," repeats Igor, his hand tightening on his grimy, half-full vodka glass.

"That's what I thought you said, but I didn't believe a man could utter such an idiocy as that."

Ivan, in a reverie, remembers his essay collection, The Treatments of Rosebud, and how the book was taken from him when he was placed in an orphanage when he was ten. The bullies there all read poetry. 

Now it is Igor's turn to be silent. The heat within him rises, his blood boiling, as the stove crackles and hisses, a menacing red furnace light shining between the iron grates.

"Tolstoy. Dostoevsky. Turgenev. All prose writers, the only literature of any consequence to come out of the Motherland."

"Wasted words. Long blathering farts that say little, have no elegance."

"Better than pansy-sniffing pussies who work for weeks on a phrase that no one can understand."

"At least they think about what they are saying, combine beauty with form and thought, get at truths prose writers only imitate, the lazy blow-hards."

"But prose writers like women, and get into fights... They throw their characters in front of trains."

"Like I said: crude, inelegant bastards."

Igor tightens his grip and prepares to leap at his attacker, quadriceps tightening. He looks to the wall, where his shotgun hangs on pegs.

Ivan feels in his pocket for a knife, ready to spring, the blade locked in a single flourish of his thumb.

A blast of arctic wind hits the hut like a hammer blow and Ivan is the first to his feet. A quick lunge and he has impaled Igor with his high carbon blade.

The door is open before Igor hits the floor and Ivan runs for his life into the searing and bitter wind.

He knows he was right.

A fish takes the bait and the pole in the hut tips up, but no one is there to reel in the catch.


* Actual event, dramatized here because I could not resist. Here's a link to a news article about it:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-rt-us-russia-killing-poetry-20140129,0,4059892.story