Outside Paradise and Other Stories

After the Commune, the respectable ladies of Versailles come out to look at the prisoners. Mme Loriot asks a woman where she tore her skirt. "The Versailles soldiers tried to rape me." - "Our gallant liberators? And you have the face to say such a thing? They jumped into blazing houses to save the children!"

Two girls under a parasol push forward, wanting to know exactly where it happened. The ladies go on searching the crowd for interesting specimens, their cheeks flushed. "What amazing creatures! Their savage customs and almost unbelievable vices were so exciting to read about in the daily newspapers!"

That is Clemence Perrier's Death, sixteen thousand words on the suppression of the Paris Commune, written by a Latvian in 1930 who had never been to Paris. Its method is to keep the camera on the victors and let them talk. There is not a single word of Marxist vocabulary in it anywhere.

Twelve stories, each dated by the author: 1902 to 1930. Every one was written before Latvia was a Soviet republic, under the Russian Empire or the independent republic. Not one is a socialist-realist work.

Which is the more interesting once you know that Upits chaired the Writers' Union of the Latvian SSR for a decade and took a state prize for a book on the problems of socialist realism. The volume tells you none of it, and prints no date.

Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, undated. Translated from the Lettish by T. Zalite, edited by Robert Daglish.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.