36 pages • 1 hour read
Anthony MarraThe Tsar of Love and Techno
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Side A, Story 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Side A, Story 1 Summary: “The Leopard (Leningrad, 1937)”
Set in 1937, “The Leopard” follows Roman Markin, who works as a Soviet censor artist for the Communist party. His primary work for the party lies in retouching and airbrushing pictures of Stalin, making him look better, and erasing enemies of the state from other pictures. The premise behind erasing these people from these thousands of photographs is to erase their historical existence. The work is constant and tedious, yet for an art connoisseur such as Markin, the touch-ups also provide him with an outlet for creativity. Markin’s work for the party has led him to betray his own brother Vladimir (Vaska), who refused to abandon his religious faith and died for it, and who now must also be erased from any and all photographic records.
Filled with guilt after his brother’s death, Markin visits Vaska’s wife and her son, his nephew (also named Vladimir), offering help. She refuses his help, however, and his guilt unassuaged. In time, Markin starts adding his brother into the background of every painting that he has changed, including a landscape painting by a Russian artist named Zakharov. Markin’s days are full of gloomy despair, until one day, a photo of a ballerina enthralls him. His fascination leads him to act impulsively, inexplicably leaving her left hand in the photo and taking the photo home to this apartment. Soon after taking the photo home, Markin is taken into custody, placed into solitary confinement, and eventually forced into confessing that he has colluded with the dancer, who apparently was involved in a Polish spy ring. The arresting officers stomped on his spectacles, so while he is in prison, he cannot see.
While in confinement, Markin loses track of time, each day folding into the next one. The more he insists that he is innocent to his investigator, the more they push back and tell him that the truth doesn’t matter—the accusation is enough to convict him. Desperate for companionship, Markin starts tapping in code on his cell wall. He eventually starts getting coded replies from a fellow prisoner who calls himself a seminarian. In addition to a female Polish tutor who helps Markin make his confession believable, the seminarian is the only company Markin has had since arriving at the prison. Markin eventually utters to his tutor that he loves her, in a tragic yet touching moment. Finally, as he is about to go to his death, he asks the prison guards for the name of the seminarian in the cell next to him. They tell him there was never a man in the cell next to him. In fact, there isn’t even a cell there. Markin is in despair, his only real legacy the hundreds of Vaska faces painted into other pictures.
Side A, Story 1 Analysis
This is a story about betrayals, about making peace with one’s own conscience, which Markin is unable to do. By turning on his own brother in the name of the Communist regime, Markin becomes almost manic in his attempt to somehow immortalize his brother. His state of mind causes him to leave the Polish dancer’s hand in the picture, which is what brings on his demise.
As he loses track of space and time during his imprisonment, Markin’s mind becomes volatile, oscillating between guilt, anger, and despair. Thus, as Markin’s loneliness in solitary confinement only serves to worsen his mental and emotional state, he reveals the weakness of his own convictions. His belief in Communist ideals is not an unshakeable conviction, but a way of making his own existence manageable in Communist Russia. During his interrogation, Markin soon realizes that truth: reality is not what his interrogators are after. Instead, Markin’s responsibility is simply to start selling the idea of his guilt, pointlessly prolonging his life to make a false confession about his involvement in the Polish spy ring that that the ballerina from the picture was involved in. As a reinforcement to this notion, his interrogator tells him, “You think you narrate your own story, but you’re only the blank page” (35). The only aspect of Markin’s life that he had any control over was the work he performed, removing people from pictures in an absurd attempt to redefine history without the presence of any alternative explanation. Most notably, just as Markin works to erase enemies of the state from photographs, he has also erased his brother’s life, a decision from which he cannot recover. His obsession with painting his brother into the pictures he has altered is the penance he has convinced himself that he must pay. Ironically, at the end of the story, as he faces certain death, Markin suffers a final blow, as he struggles to face the idea that the man he imagined was communicating with him in the adjacent cell may just have been a figment of his imagination. Reality is subjective, just as the history he has modified through his censorship.
Related Titles
By Anthony Marra
