A Demented Waltz with Dead Russian Officials
How you play is you can either choose a Russian official or a dead author. Everyone wants to be an official because it’s more exciting. Usually Ivan the Terrible gets picked first, and then Rasputin, then Lenin and Stalin and all the more recent ones, and if you go down the row and people start running out of Russian officials they know about, or if they named one that didn’t exist, they can be either a boyar or a bureaucrat and they have to stand on the other side of the room. The kids who have been playing for the longest usually aren’t boyars because if you’ve been playing long enough you start collecting the names of Russians and listening to the ones other people pick, so there’s seniority.
There are usually fewer authors, but there’s always a Dostoevsky and a Tolstoy and sometimes a Gogol. You only need a few authors, anyway.
Now here’s how it works: everyone lines up, the officials on one side of the room, the boyars and bureaucrats on the other side. The authors stand in the middle. The game doesn’t begin until an author walks up to an official and denounces them, and then that official has to try to throw the author in Siberia, so they join hands and the weird part is they waltz, but they’re both pushing at each other, and the official is trying to push the author to the northern end of the room, which is Siberia, and the author is trying to push the official to the boyars and bureaucrats who are all standing with one hand against the wall and reaching, because if you’re a boyar and you touch an official then you get to throw the official in Siberia and then take his position on the other wall. Then maybe someone will come up and denounce you and you can waltz with them for a while. The goal is to get all the authors thrown in Siberia, which is why it’s not very fun to be an author.
5 comments:
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Patrick Sugrue on March 25, 2012 at 7:22 PM said...
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This is funny. I like how the metaphor is extended (almost) all the way. Perhaps this would be a longer piece, but I wonder if removing the authorial voice that's narrating and replacing it with a more innocent, naive, one would be useful. This borders on expository most of the way. I'd like to see how people act WHEN playing this game, not just knowing that the game is played. But why is it played? What kind of a world are we in where people play this game? What does this game say about the world that we know? That we live in? Besides being a historical commentary on Russia, I'm not sure I see a further extension into our lives. Bringing a few interesting characters into the fray might really ground this piece.
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Chacha Murdick on March 26, 2012 at 12:26 PM said...
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I like the way facts are stated. The tone is very consistent, very matter-of-fact, quite like a very serious little kid who is quite serious about games would explain a game. This voice really works. You could do a lot with it.
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Gabriella Bertrand on March 28, 2012 at 2:44 PM said...
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This was a very entertaining piece. I enjoyed how the tone in last part of the piece was as if the narrator was trying to explain a complicated children's game. It's not so simple as a kid saying, "The white tiles are lava, and the green tiles are rocks, don't step in the lava!" it's much darker and more serious. I truly enjoyed this piece and I think you can expand upon it if you want to by describing the narrator a little more, but the piece works on its own as well.
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Galen Westerfield on March 28, 2012 at 10:13 PM said...
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This reminded me of Nathan Englander's "The Twenty-seventh Man." I like the dynamic that's at play here but I'm curious why it's waltz because the implication is that someone's leading. If you wanted to expand the piece any further I think focusing on this dimension of dance would be a good way to start, though I liked the piece overall as is.
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Kylee McIntyre on April 7, 2012 at 10:18 PM said...
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Yay!!! An extended metaphor that works!
Yay!!! Educated leader-type-people made into children!
This reminded me of a lecture that a history teacher with a dry sense of humor would use to teach. Even the title plays into this (no pun intended). -
