Fighting to stay positive...
As noted earlier, The Partisan Job™ represents only about the last 16% or so of a book about Soviet guerrilla fighters during the Great Patriotic War (what Russians call their part of what we in the West call "World War II"). Alas, the section appears to be devoted to pathological behavior on the part of some participants, and in working my way through the text, I've "recaptured" a feeling that has only overcome me twice before in my life.
The first time was in my childhood, when my parents took me along for a visit to some kind of wax museum at Coney Island, The only thing I really remember of that visit was the seemingly endless procession of life-sized dioramas depicting gruesome crimes that frequently involved dismemberment. I recall I was not scared at the time—through I did have a nightmare or two soon after—as much as I was repulsed and made to feel as if the world was a cesspool.
Up until last night, I don't think I have ever consciously thought about that museum visit, not even when I read the second volume of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, which had a similar impact on me. (Why I escaped relatively unscathed after reading the first volume is anyone's guess... maybe because I read it as part of my academic curriculum?)
I suppose the memory of the museum was triggered by my having to translate a particularly unpleasant episode in which a partisan unit that had literally gone underground, into caves, engaged in the murder, dismemberment, and preservation (in brine) of any arriving civilian refugees who managed to escape the Germans and Romanians.
Fortunately, some other work has come in this morning, and I am quite happy to put The Partisan Job™ aside for a while to take care of it.
The first time was in my childhood, when my parents took me along for a visit to some kind of wax museum at Coney Island, The only thing I really remember of that visit was the seemingly endless procession of life-sized dioramas depicting gruesome crimes that frequently involved dismemberment. I recall I was not scared at the time—through I did have a nightmare or two soon after—as much as I was repulsed and made to feel as if the world was a cesspool.
Up until last night, I don't think I have ever consciously thought about that museum visit, not even when I read the second volume of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, which had a similar impact on me. (Why I escaped relatively unscathed after reading the first volume is anyone's guess... maybe because I read it as part of my academic curriculum?)
I suppose the memory of the museum was triggered by my having to translate a particularly unpleasant episode in which a partisan unit that had literally gone underground, into caves, engaged in the murder, dismemberment, and preservation (in brine) of any arriving civilian refugees who managed to escape the Germans and Romanians.
Fortunately, some other work has come in this morning, and I am quite happy to put The Partisan Job™ aside for a while to take care of it.