#ButCommunism

“Every Day I Wake Up in a Strange Land”: Remembering the Russian Poet Naum Korzhavin

"Three years later, Korzhavin, a student at the Literary Institute in Moscow, was arrested, in the middle of the night, in his dormitory. Some said that Korzhavin was arrested for a poem critical of Stalin. Others said that he fell victim to Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaign against what Soviet papers called “cosmopolitanism.” When Korzhavin wrote about the arrest, forty years later, he described it primarily as absurd. When the secret police woke him up and demanded to see his poems, he recalled, he had nothing to show them: he kept his manuscripts with friends, not because he felt that he had anything to hide but simply because he was incapable of maintaining his own papers. Once he faced his interrogator, he wrote, he subverted the script by earnestly asking what he had done wrong. “I really wanted to know what happened—and what if I had made a mistake and this man knew what it was,” Korzhavin recalled. “Thus I won this idiocy contest. My cultivated sincere idiocy prevailed over his professional idiocy.”"