If the ambitious articled clerk from Simbirsk
had played chess more on Capri with Maxim Gorki
and had listened more to the Appassionata,
and, oh yes, if - for he had mused thereon -
he would rather have stroked
than struck,
if he had lost himself in gawping endlessly
at the miracle of Geneva's Central Post Office
(no mind of provincial government could light
upon a thing more admirable), why then . . .
perhaps there would've been
some trite Kerenskian alternative:
less refrigerstated revolution,
more survivors.


translated by GÖMÖRI György and Clive WILMER