Truth in History

According to private critical reviews, the story about Stalin's stand-up comedy and Lenin was "really funny" but my idea for a Lenin romantic drama, "also funny, but not as much." The old adage goes, it's funny because it's true.

This is actually a good point to stop and talk a little about a past movement in historical writing. A lot of radical historical comedians up until the middle of the last century took the "funny because it's true" theory to mean that various historical events did not occur because they weren't funny. Diseases we know now to have been devastating were rarely considered historically provable (an exception is the plague--Chaucer is funny) and Native-American history (a bummer) was the realm of pseudo-historians. In fact, the period in American history from the end of the so-called "Era of Good Feelings" (hilarious for obvious reasons) to the time when abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner was beaten mercilessly by pro-slavery Congressman Preston Brooks in the Capital Building was an unverifiable, boring void.

In the 1960s, Paul Venn invented a diagram which systematically proved that while things that are funny are always true, true things are not always funny. This revelation unleashed a deluge of works on not-funny subjects such as the Holocaust, polio and slavery among others, which were thought to be false previously.

(The verity of polio was controversial before Venn. Some historical comedians considered President Roosevelt's affliction ironic because the formerly freewheeling Roosevelt gained the austerity while confined to a wheelchair that led to his election. Thus, some argued, if Roosevelt's polio had been funny, the disease happened. Others disagreed, citing the fact that the disease itself was not funny but was the cause of humor. Was it not more likely, they asked, that Roosevelt's disease was a proven entity, like scoliosis or plague?)

Getting back to Lena's Vladimir, I realized it wasn't as funny as the history of Lenin's death because it wasn't as true. In the former, I presented some linguistic evidence that young Lenin was involved in a torrid love affair with a woman named Elena and that, in the course of the Revolution, he chose to have her killed for political crimes in spite of his love for her. Stacked against the rock hard archival evidence I produced to prove my theory about Lenin's death, the evidence for Lena's Vladimir was a little soft.

Over the last week I was working in the Ulyanovsk State Archive and, though I was unable to find conclusive evidence, I found the following correspondence between a certain E. Andreeva and a "Vladimir," without a doubt, Lenin (my translation):

Andreeva to Vladimir
June 3, 1889

Dear Vladimir,

Your words brought hope to my heart. Inside you burns a revolutionary fire as red as the hair that covers your loins. Come hither as soon as you can leave the socialist front. [Emphasis mine--F.B.]

Love,
E. Andreeva

I emphasized the word "socialist" in the last sentence to point out the ideological difference between the lovers. Andreeva considered socialism to be the end goal of the future revolution, while Lenin, by this time a devoted Marxist, considered socialism a stopping point on the way to communism. Forbidden love if I've ever seen it.