The Brute in Purple*

A magnificent wolf who was Autocrat of All the Russias

The Story. "Peter is born." Thus his story begins. Red snow falls. Wolves howl. Peter howls. His mother the Czarina is wafted to heaven. God receives her on His throne of lapis lazuli. The Tsar is dead--Peter's father?

Peter's older brother, Ivan, is a moron; his sister, Sofia, is grasping for the throne. His mother's lover, Prince Galizyn, has been inherited by Sofia. A Prussian lieutenant tutors Peter in the palace at Preobrashensk. One day tailors arrive. Peter is outfitted and taken to Moscow. Ivan is dead. Peter is proclaimed Tsar.

"Long live Peter the Tsar!" cry the people. "Long live Russia!" bellows Peter.

Peter's first love is a dirty brown gypsy. She tells his fortune. His second is young and tender. She dies of his love.

One day, at 19, Peter stalks into the Council of State. With his dagger he nails to the table a paper in his sister's hand. She has signed it "the Autocrat of All the Russias."

Peter begins to drill 1,000 picked men for his bodyguard. A monk, Golovin, comes to assassinate him. Peter snatches away his dagger.

Peter orders the provinces to send their prettiest girls to Moscow. He picks a wife, and everyone gets drunk.

He attacks Azov, warring against Kalmucks, Tartars and Turks. His soldiers desert. His siege fails. He builds ships at Voronesk. He mans them with Dutchmen and Germans. He takes Azov and crucifies the Khan and two generals. He drives a spear into their sides.

He sets out on a tour of Europe. He makes gifts; here a few pounds of rhubarb, there the skin of a black fox or a sable. Only twice does he give away an ermine, once to the Queen of Holland, once to a wench who satisfies him. At Riga he is chased away from the fortifications. At Koenigsberg he makes the Grand Electress blush, argues with Leibnitz, is trained in gunnery. At Berlin he rapes the Duchess of Mecklenburg. In Holland he learns anatomy and ship building. At Vienna he gets word of a revolution in Russia.

He kills his horse driving back to Preobrashensk, and arrives with wolves harnessed to his sled. He meets a rebellious regiment and touches with his whip handle the men to be hanged by their com rades. Before the Cathedral of Saint Basil blood flows from his manifold executions. Other rebels are hanged and sent floating down the Don on rafts.

Charles XII, boy king of Sweden, beats Peter on the battlefield. In the retreat, a Russian general takes a girl, Katharina, whom later he gives to Peter. Peter likes her. He sends the Tsarina to a nunnery.

He decides to build a new capital. In the swamps of the Neva it rises. It costs in lives 10,000 horses, 100,000 men. As Peter takes possession, the Swedes attack. Peter beats them at Poltawa and they flee to the Turks. Peter follows, is surrounded, nearly annihilated. Then he and Katharina overcome their enemies. Livonia, Esthonia, Ingria, Karelia. the Ukraine are Peter's. Sweden, Poland, Turkey are humbled.

Peter is growing old. His lust for knowledge, conquest, women, has waned. He catches disease. Torches burn in his belly. He sends for his enemy, the monk Golivin. He puts on the monk's cassock to be carried to the tomb. He starts to dictate his will and dies. Katharina crowns herself. She likes Golivin's brown back, and makes him Patriarch. He says the death mass for the Tsar. After a night with Katharina, Golivin goes back to the Cathedral, throws himself in remorse upon the Tsar's sarcophagus: "Arise! anointed one! Come back!"

The Significance. This is no biography, no historical novel. It has no dates, no footnotes, no bibliography. It is a series of fierce impressions, summing into 150 small pages the impression of a man's life. It has terrific compression and impact. An example from the text:

"A storm comes up on the return voyage. "Ivan the Terrible begins to spin like a top. "Peter is desperate. "He falls on his knees. "He weeps. "He beats the sailors. "He kisses them. "He prays. "He promises the Lord Jesus Christ a cross if he will save him from shipwreck. He promises to appoint Him a Russian Rear-Admiral. "Ivan the Terrible is hurled upon the coast and shattered to pieces. "Peter and the sailors are washed upon the shore like dead fish."

The Author. "Klabund" is the pen name of Alfred Henschke, a German author still in his early 30's. He has spent his few years in studying at the universities of Berlin, Munich, Lausanne. Besides, he is a great traveler--spends only his winters in Berlin and the rest of the year roaming the world. The spirit of the man who wrote this strange book about Peter the Great is best expressed in his own words: "I must go on fighting with a hot blade the sounding battles within me to the end."

Michael Shenstone

RUNAWAY--Floyd Dell--Doran ($2). Michael Shenstone had a quarrel with respectability, and when for 13 years it had seared his wanderlustful soul, he bolted, leaving wife and child to Beaumont's communal pity. Seventeen years he spent raping the beautiful heads of Chinese idols and vagabonding in the Orient. At last he returned with a gay malacca stick, a piquant cloak and no repentance in his heart, only a desire to have a look at his daughter. In the end respectability made him hers through the romance of father love, and the accident of discovering a defaulter, which set him high in Beaumont. Spiced with whimsicality and paradox, the book cannot wholly disguise the musty flavor of its meat.

Michael Webb

BREAD & CIRCUSES--W. E. Woodward--Harper ($2). To the Angel of Death an old man complained: "I have not lived. . . . I've worked . . . talked a lot . . . loved . . . hated . . . laughed a good deal . . . built some houses . . . brought up my children . . . thought a little . . . and--" The Angel of Death interrupted, "That was Life." Thus Mr. Woodward prepared for his story: After a successful career as a vender of thinking--wholesale and retail--Michael Webb (friend of readers of Bunk) establishes himself at Echo Hill Inn in Connecticut. In this labyrinthine tavern with steps up, steps down from room to room, with a billiard room that is half of the kitchen marked off by a broad red line across which the cooks dare not tread but over which they pasa nicely browned sausages or still-warm tarts to the loungers in the billiard department--in this delectable tavern foregather Michael Webb and claimants to culture. Their discursive and argumentative flights--hodgepodge of raillery and provocative philosophy--are the substance of the book. Three or four years pass unobtrusively, disconnectedly, and the book ends as it progressed, inconspicuously yet without any sense of incompleteness, for a romance has culminated in a formal wedding with a formal clergyman and a very formal church.

*PETER THE CZAR--Klabund (translated by Herman George Scheffauer)--Putnam ($2).