Here, Saul Bellow writes to Albert Glotzer, a friend and prominent figure in the Chicago and New York Trotskyite circles, about Russian history and literature.
Dear Al,
I thought of you while chatting with Richard Pipes, the Russian historian. He’s getting ready to publish a collection of recently released Lenin documents from the early years—1917 to 1923. I wish you had been here when he described some of them. One is an order to find and hang a hundred Kulaks. Just hang them, his instructions were, and leave them hanging as long as possible. A few years ago we in America were calling this consciousness-raising. On the other hand, one still meets people from Harvard with a hear-no-evil fixation on the essential benevolence of the Soviet Union from first to last. But of course now we’re talking about character formations of the middle class, not about politics.
I haven’t read Crime and Punishment in many years—I have it scheduled for the coming winter—but I have a distinct recollection of Raskolnikov’s double murder. He waits until the old usurer’s sister is out of the way, but just as he hits the money lender on the head with his axe, the door opens and he sees the shocked face of the simpleton sister who has returned. He has no choice but to kill her, too. It is the second killing that plagues his conscience. I can’t remember if he ever regrets the first murder. But the innocent sister who unexpectedly comes home is a True Believer and also an intimate friend of the prostitute Sonya whom Raskolnikov eventually marries. Tell Maggie for me that I hope I haven’t upset her. I will be reading the book in March and if I’m wrong about the second victim I shall send a dozen American Beauties to apologize.
My health improves daily. I say this only to friends. Illness gives me a whole range of marvelous excuses for refusing thousands of requests that come in the mail.
On Thursday Janis and I are flying down to Coral Gables to attend the wedding of my youngest son, Daniel. Youngest? He’ll be thirty-two in March. Nobody is young anymore, except the grandchildren, and even they look a little wrinkled from time to time—my own projection, of course. I must have and ailing cornea.
Best wishes,
[Saul]
From Saul Bellow: Letters. Bellow, Saul, and Benjamin Taylor. New York: Viking, 2010.