Soviet Union – in a special train to Leningrad

Truman Capote spent the last days of 1955 in the USSR. Stalin has been dead for three years, but the Cold War is still as cold as the outside temperatures: double digits below zero. As a journalist, Capote belongs to the accompanying road to the Gershwin Opera »Porgy and Bess«, which is to be performed in Moscow and Leningrad. The opera has been two decades old, but it is the first cultural exchange between the USA and the USSR, which brings it to the media again.

And it is Capote’s first “factual novel”, a new form of journalism that, coming from the literature, he will later bring to the championship with “cold -blooded”. His Russian travel report ties in with a tradition: Especially in the 1930s, left -wing writers such as Oskar Maria Graf or Lion Feuchtwanger had traveled to the Soviet Union and then delivered reports that generally announced from their consent to euphoria. Even Stalin’s terror did not like to dampen these hopes for a salvation -bringing future of communism.

Capote has never believed in the world revolution. He does not want to comment politically, but also knows that the Soviet hosts have other expectations. In this way, the African American ensemble members are asked how it feels to live in a country that wants to stand as sample democracy worldwide, but practices so -called racial segregation in individual states.

The artist troop travels in the special train and stays on the very first addresses. In the railway, in the hotel, press conferences and sightseeing of the sights, make a lot of attention that contacts with the local population do not become too tight. All the best conditions for a trange report? Not with capote! Because it just can’t write boring. Half of the plot plays on the train, which are the only locations on solid ground, next to the train stations, East Berlin and Leningrad (Moscow leaves off). It never becomes a barren: With a few sentences, the author manages to characterize at least two dozen fellow travelers: American artists, assistants, managers, journalists; Soviet supervisors, interpreters, uniformed and one or the other KGB agent.

Capote’s ease of the atmosphere, despite all the political adversities, is due to the atmosphere, despite all the political adversities. In the so -called Soviet man, he never returns the human side reliably, never valuable, purely journalistically descriptive. Once also out of idlomy: as Capote still about the apparent loss of a precisely expensive fur hat granted – where can he have just forgotten you? -is it the KGB man who reads them up and reproduces him.

Cold War? The warm reception, which the audience grants to the artists and the fawns of the entire crowd of guests, could also be interpreted as the implementation of the political thaw postulated by Khrushchev. Capote would never draw such conclusions. He is probably not a term for him, Ilja Ehrenburg’s romantic title, to whom the campaign has gave its name.

Most people are in Leningrad. A functional is very interested in the blonde assistant to the US management, gives her a rubber rabbit and does not give up. “He wants to go dancing with me,” she explains Capote and asks: “Do you mean, that’s okay?” The answer gives her: “I mean as long as it stays dancing.” If not, it doesn’t matter. ”What became of it, Capote does not reveal.

With the same official, Capote visits a workers’ pub in Leningrad. It is open for almost as long as a New York bar, but the effect of the alcohol seems to be much more powerful here: In addition to the hangover, Truman remains the memory of an experience with all their senses, “as if I had come into a well -lit bear pit”. The journalistic distance has evaporated, no more trace of reluctance: »I suddenly stood in the body warm, beer -heavy evaporation of around one hundred roaring, arguing, sturdy men, the rays like a wet fox. They sat around one of the six tables for a dozen. «

And first the staff! Truman’s objectivity finally disappears in view of the “only women in the room”, his perception according to “three identical waitresses of robust design, about as wide as high and with rounds, plates.” On political correctness, the translator Marcus Ingendaay will also be in the German version. In the end, however, this trio climbs into Trumans: are they who have everything under control and provide an all -round successful evening.

“The muses speak”, the title of his book alludes to the welcoming speech by an employee of the Soviet Ministry of Culture, in which he formulated: “When the cannons can be heard, the muses are silent. When the cannons are silent, you can hear the muses. ”Even ten years after the end of the Second World War, the interior of the USSR is the contemporary US citizen as far as North Korea today. Capotes look is distant, but clear; His attitude neutral, but not without participation: the readership should form its own judgment. This report diary is still an exciting reading seven decades later.

Truman Capote: The muses speak. A. d. America. English by Marcus Ingendaay. No & but, 192 pages, Br., € 13.