into the wonderful and shameful life of all the people in the world. Babel’s narrator was examined by the teachers Karavaev and Piatnitsky. They asked him about Peter the Great. Everything I knew about Peter the Great I had memorized from Put- sykovich’s textbook and Pushkin’s verses. I was reciting those verses in a violent sob, when suddenly human faces came rolling into my eyes and mixed themselves up like cards from a new deck. As they were shuffling themselves in the back of my eyes, I shouted out Pushkin’s stanzas with all my might, trembling, straightening up, hurrying. I kept shouting them for a long time, and no one interrupted my demented muttering. Through a crimson blindness, through the sense of freedom that had taken possession of me, all I could see was Piatnitsky’s bent-down, old face, with its silver- streaked beard. He did not interrupt me but merely said to Karavaev, who was rejoicing for my sake and for Pushkin’s, “What a people,” whispered the old man, “these little Jews of yours. There’s a devil in them.” 42 Perhaps by coincidence, Samuil Marshak, the famous Soviet children’s writer, drew the same question at his exam. He, too, chose to recite Pushkin’s verses, possibly the same ones from “Poltava.” I inhaled as deeply as I could and began not too loudly, saving my breath for the heat of battle. It seemed to me that I had never heard my own voice before. In flares of dawn the east is burning Along the ridges, down the dales The cannon growl. With purple churning The smoke of salvos skyward sails And drapes the slanting sun in veils. I had read these verses and recited them by heart over and over again at home, although no one had ever assigned them to me. But here, in this large room, they sounded clearer and more joyous than ever. I was looking at the people seated at the table, and it seemed to me that, just as I did, they saw before them the smoke-covered battlefield, the flames from the salvos, and Peter on his steed.