isaac-deutscher-the-prophet-armed-trotsky-1879-1921

HOME AND SCHOOL
read one of his compositions, express rapturous admiration for
the way the boy handled and marshalled words.
He was spellbound by the theatre as well. ' ... I developed a
fondness for Italian opera which was the pride of Odessa ..••
I even did some tutoring to earn money for theatre tickets. For
several months I was mutely in love with the coloratura soprano,
bearing the mysterious name of Giuseppina U get, who seemed
to me to have descended straight from heaven to the stage
boards of Odessa.' 1 The intoxication with the theatre, with its
limelight, costumes, and masks, and with its passions and conflicts,
accords well with the adolescence of a man who was to act
his role with an intense sense of the dramatic, and of whose life
it might indeed be said that its very shape had the power and
pattern of classical tragedy.
From Odessa, Lyova returned to Yanovka for summer holidays
and for Christmas, or sometimes to repair his health. At
every return he saw visible signs of growing prosperity. The
home he had left was that of an ordinary well-to-do farmer; the
one he came back to looked more and more like a landlord's
estate. The Bronsteins were building a large country house for
themselves and their children; yet they still lived and worked as
of old. The father still spent his days bargaining with muzhiks
over sacks of flour in the mill, inspecting his cowsheds, watching
his labourers at the harvest, and occasionally himself grasping
the scythe. The nearest post-office and railway station were still
twenty or so miles away. Nobody read a newspaper here-at the
most his mother would slowly and laboriously read an old
novel, moving her toil-worn finger across the pages.
These homecomings filled Lyova with mixed feelings. He had
remained enough of a villager to feel constricted in the city and to
enjoy the wide and operi steppe. Here he uncoiled himself, played,
walked, and rode. But at each return he also felt more and more
a stranger at Yanovka. His parents' pursuits seemed unbearably
narrow, their manners coarse, and their way oflife purposeless.
He began to perceive how much ruthlessness towards labourers
and muzhiks went into the making of a farmer's prosperity,
even if that ruthlessness was, as it seems to have been at Yanovka,
softened by patriarchal benevolence. While on holidays, Lyova
helped with book-keeping and calculating wages; and some-
' L. Trotsky, op. cit., vol. i, p. 85.