I pull the bedclothes to my chin, douse the light and wait. A pause, and then it comes: the dog’s soft spring up into the space where humans sleep. He circles—once, twice— between my feet and hers, settles over the usual spot, and lowers his bones. Coiled now, nose to tail, he breathes a single, cleansing sigh, and ends the day for all.

More and more I wonder at such scenes, at disconnection absolute: at moments, ordinary in each time and not so far apart, become as alien from each other as planets circling separate stars. Stranger still to think of what’s to come, of specters, queer as dreams, who’ll roam these urban spaces ages after we have gone. I suppose they’ll give what pictures of the past we leave at best a wry and fleeting glance.

At nearly eighty-nine she died, quite suddenly and alone; on a bright mid-summer morn it was, her loved ones far away. Applying a touch of rouge, it seems, her best brooch pinned in place; right properly well turned out she was, ready to greet old friends. But only the bedroom mirror saw the astonishment in her eyes; and only the bedroom mirror caught her image as she fell.

So solemn it seemed scant days ago– lovers, tear-spent talking out last syllables of a life together, huddled there knees to chin in moonlit midnight, running tongues over hollow spaces, tasting separation’s acid speaking epitaphs. Now sprawled unshaven in a bed too large for one (television in the corner flickering blue), I feast not on sorrow only but with surprising equal relish on a hoard of red pistachios beside me in a jar.

Part V | FINAL The Final Phase of Art and Culture Given the opposition of true Marxists to anything that smacks of socialism from above, it’s hardly surprising that Trotsky spends only a small fraction of Literature and Revolution, in fact just the last of the nine essays in the…

Part IIII Getting to the Third Stage How, in fact, does Trotsky propose to move past revolution-focused, transitional art to the new socialist culture of the final phase? For one, he argues that the Proletkult, the communist organization in the 1920s charged with raising the cultural level of the working…

Part III The Standards for Revolutionary or Proletarian Literature What then are the characteristics of the second phase, of true revolutionary art, according to Trotsky? Like Marx, Trotsky first considers the material conditions, the rough physical circumstances and preoccupations in which revolutionary art is and will be generated. The climate…

Part II Pre-Revolutionary Examples Outside Russia Given his concentration on Russia and near-historical literary phenomena like the symbolists, formalists, futurists and realists, it’s not surprising Trotsky overlooks celebrated nineteenth-century examples of pre-revolutionary literature. Among the partially enlightened bourgeois precursors he references, there’s no mention of Thomas Carlyle who in an…

Part 1 As a teacher of literature and communication, as well as a small-time poet and short-story writer, I’ve long been concerned about the place of the arts in a socialist society. What latitude will universal socialism permit the individual imagination? What part will the arts and their long history…