Arsenii Tarkovsky's Strange Thwarting of Poet Stalin

At Lit Hub, Ilya Kutik and Reginald Gibbons detail the survival of the Russian poet Arsenii Tarkovsky (1907-1989), father of filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. The piece also looks at Stalin's work ... in poetry:

...Tarkovsky found that most of Stalin’s poems in the crocodile bag were short, and most were poems of idyllic Georgian landscapes—mountains, meadows, forests, rivers, plains. But one poem—longer—was a narrative against social injustice, in which a poor young man and a wealthy girl fall in love. Tarkovsky made drafts of the shortest poem and the longest, and there he stopped.

A month after receiving his commission, and again well after midnight, the telephone rang, and Tarkovsky was told to put all his work into the bag, along with everything he had received from the Politburo. He would be picked up in a few minutes.

Because they wanted a different translator? Or…?

This time, Tarkovsky was certain he would be arrested. Again came men, and again he did not take the little suitcase with clothes and necessities, but only the crocodile-skin bag, and again the car went three times around Lyubyanka Square, and again it did not enter the prison but instead proceeded to the Kremlin.

The three men in black delivered him to a different room this time. There was no party in progress. A few lower officials were waiting in the deadly quiet. They offered him weak tea, cheese, bread. They took the bag from him and told him to stay in this room, and they went elsewhere in the vast building.

Alone, Tarkovsky waited. In a while one man returned, again with the crocodile-skin bag, and handed it back to him. “You should appreciate very much, Comrade Tarkovsky, the exceptional modesty of our Great Leader. He has refused to publish translations of his poems while he remains with us… In the briefcase is an honorarium for your work. You may go.”

So much more at Lit Hub.