More about Lenin (a love story)
This is a revelation I had a couple months ago when I was talking to a lady I work with named Elena (shortened, Lena) about Lenin. I mentioned Lenin's room and she said, "My room?" I said, "No, Ulyanov's." She said, "Oh, I was confused there for a minute."
The confusion comes from the fact that the Russian adjective lenin means Lena's, so when I said "room of Lenin" (which sounds fine in Russian but may have been weird in context) she heard "room Lena's" (which sounds weird in Russian but works grammatically). She said that she frequently had trouble with these kinds of mix-ups, since people talk about Lenin a lot and people also talk about her in the third person frequently. (She's an avant-garde performance artist who has turned her life into an act she calls "Third Personal.")
But since Lenin's name is a pseudonym, what does that mean about him? This crappy website talks about two possibilities that have been ruled out: a reference to the Lena River as opposition to Georgi Plekhanov (real name), whose one time pseudonym referred to the Volga River, and the Lena execution, which happened after Lenin used the pseudonym.
I'm going to put forward here a totally unverifiable story about Lenin falling in love with a girl named Elena when he was young (before he met Mrs. Lenin, whose name was Nadezhda) and then using her name as his pseudonym as a sign of everlasting love/youthful lust. I'm also going to write this as a movie script, sort of like that bad Chris O'Donnell, Sandra Bullock movie about Hemingway in Italy, but with Lenin. And yes, plenty of nudity. Also, I think the end of the movie will be Lenin personally signing her death sentence, or personally watching Dzerzhinsky or Trotsky do it, and crying. (They had to kill her because she was a Social Revolutionary, not a Bolshevik.) Maybe she escapes, but probably not. I'm still working out the kinks. Any suggestions for the role of young or old Lenin?
Monday, February 11, 2008
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