Tyorkin in the Other World is a satirical sequel to Tvardovsky’s heroic war-time
epic Vasiliy Tyorkin: A Book about a Soldier. Written in the early 1950s, when Tvardovsky
was temporarily removed from the editorship of Novy
Mir, the poem imagines that Private Tyorkin has died and gone to the ‘Other World’.
The joke is that Hell turns out to be like the Soviet Union under Stalin, an oppressive, bureaucratic
and culturally conservative society of Dead souls. Although the poem circulated
among Moscow intellectuals for several years, it was only published after Khrushchev invited Tvardovsky
to his dacha to read it (Sartre and de Beauvoir were also there). In the context
of the Thaw, the book was an immediate commercial and critical success, and was
turned into a hit stage-play. After the fall of Khrushchev, however, it was allowed to fall
out of print.
Published here for the first time in English, Tyorkin in the Other World is a reminder of the
complexities of Soviet culture, and a brilliant example of the serious, subversive
and subtle possibilities of political satire in a closed society.