The Commissariat of Enlightenment by Ken Kalfus

degraded by the first of all the men who had come before. Gribshin had been present when prostitutes had been burned by cigarettes and whipped and otherwise insulted. He had stood by then, embarrassed. The girls were oftenshockingly naive, or at least forgetful that men’s beastliness was part of their trade.
    Some of the local girls had met their downfall only this week, on the opportunity occasioned by the presence of so many bored, cash-heavy men in the remote hamlet. Gribshin observed that their industry had been generated by the mortal illness of a reformed profligate who had railed against prostitution and been disgusted by the sex act, regardless of its purpose or the state of affairs between the man and the woman involved. In the imitation of animal behavior, the suppression of reason, and the loss of innocence, the Count saw depravity. The Count had been joined in his condemnation by the philosopher Fedorov. A bachelor and ascetic, Fedorov had promised that through science man would someday eliminate sexual appetites from his nature, just as he would abolish death. Once mankind was immortal there would be no need for procreation.
    Visiting Europeans considered the Count’s ideas and Fedorov’s laughable, and Gribshin laughed too when he comically related to them these and the other millennial theories of contemporary Russian philosophers. Sometimes this happened en route to the Moscow saloon or brothel whose address he had acquired for the party. Yet Gribshin noted the chagrin of his acquaintances, usually Pathé men or junior diplomats in some mild dishevelment, later when they were seen leaving the rooms where the women had been engaged; in the embraces he had purchased himself he monitored the deeper registers of his own disquiet. Now the corseted figure of the red-haired prostitute diminished as she rushed away and Gribshin felt himself stirred unpleasantly by currents of desire and pity.
     
    Professor Vorobev had become a familiar figure among Astapovo’s visitors. He attended the medical briefings with manifest skepticism, bunked in the press tent, and tenaciously demanded hearings before government officials and the Count’s junior apostles. That afternoon on the station platform, Vorobev managed to assemble a half dozen newspaper reporters around him, plus a few other strangers. Revisited by the chill induced by their first encounter, Gribshin paused to stand outside the little penumbra of professional interest. A gypsy band had begun a familiar tarantella in an empty lot nearby.
    “We’ve had correspondence,” Vorobev was asserting. “Of course, I’m not privileged to divulge our personal communications. But he’s a man clearly receptive to science. And a great writer, a great Russian.”
    “So he’s agreed to your proposal?”
    Vorobev smiled, demonstrating his patience with the questioner.
    “To talk of an agreement, in terms of this procedure, is a kind of empty legalism. We men of science aren’t lawyers; neither are the great men of literature.”
    “Do you have anything from him in writing?”
    Vorobev scolded the reporter. “Yes. Everything the Count has written shows him to be in so-called agreement. Read his novels, his stories, his letters, his pamphlets! He believes in beneficial scientific progress, he’s opposed to superstition and intellectual metaphysics. He’s in favor of universal education. This procedure promotes universal education in a way undreamed of merely five years ago!”
    The reporters were foreign, but another of the Tsar’s subjects, a Caucasian, shared the platform with Gribshin. He was short and squarely constructed and his face was pocked and pitted. If, unintimidated by the man’s rough countenance, you inspected his face closely, you would suspect that the tender skin above his lip had recently been shorn of its mustache. Although the man was not asking questions, he listened to Vorobev carefully.
    Runcie from the Standard pressed Vorobev: “But,