My Russian tutor has quickly become my favourite person in the world. She is quintessentially Russian. Today she brought a pigeon in a box to our meeting. She had seen it fly into a window and fall to the ground. This poor pigeon spent our entire class scrabbling its talons along the cardboard, scaring me to death. She'd inexplicably given it a hunk of bread when it clearly required urgent veterinary attention. Halfway through the class it died. She looked at it and said, 'case closed.' I laughed for a long, long time.
Some claim that the pigeons in Orwell's "Animal Farm" represent Soviet propaganda, or perhaps the Comintern. In this light, it is tempting to read this post as an allegory of the history of 20thC ideological conflict.
ReplyDelete(signed) Mourning Dove