That history is cyclical is something we all know or intuit with events that occur. The invasion of Ukraine is probably the clearest proof of this claim. The former USSR, Stalinism, Soviet society…or so we thought, they were things of the past, old photos stored in an old cookie jar. We were wrong. Totalitarianism did not end with the end of the Second World War, even with the fall of the wall. That old shadow seems to be returning in force, and our grandparents’ nightmares are taking shape. Everything comes back, like an old song we hummed.
Empty the World, written by Agustín Pérez Leal, published by Valencian publisher Pre-Textos, is a song of horror created by human insignificance, by wars, totalitarianism, absolute control of a silent population. The summary clarifies what we will find: «Moscow, 1938. The poet Ósip Mandelstam was arrested, tortured and exiled four years ago for writing and disseminating a poem against the almighty Stalin. Since then, he and his wife, Nadezhda, have lived almost like vagrants, avoiding the tentacles of power as much as possible. Now Ósip has been arrested and tortured a second time. He knows his destiny is the Siberian GULAG, but he still has a lot to save: his reputation, his lines, his memory… Someone needs to tell his story. One of many. That of the Russian people. Before it’s too late”.
Pérez Leal uses the poet Mandelstam to describe injustice as a whole. Ósip Mandelstam was convicted for writing a short maxim about Stalin: “We live without feeling the country under our feet / our words are not heard ten feet away. / The shortest interviews / filming complains to the Kremlin plateau. / His fingers are thick as worms, greasy, / and his words are like heavy hammers, true. / Cockroach whiskers seem to be laughing / and the tops of his boots are shining. // Among a horde of reeds with very thin necks / playing with the grace of these half-persons. / One whistles, the other meows, one groans, the other cries; / Only he roars and holds./ He makes up one order after another like a horseshoe:/ one to the lower abdomen, the other to the forehead, the third to the eyebrow, and the fourth to the eye. / Every execution is a celebration for him / cheers up his wide Ossetian chest». This text served Ósip’s disappearance. But it has not completely disappeared, nobody disappears physically, because we always remain as long as they remember us, and Pérez Leal uses this from the text of his widow, Nadezhda Mandelstam, who perhaps wrote some of her memoirs. for this, not to forget him. Agustín Pérez Leal reconstructs this last time of the Russian poet in direct prose, in a non-artificial, yet predatory way.
Agustín Pérez Leal (Teruel, 1965) has published poetry books La noche en arras (Pre-Textos, 2006) and Tú me movis (Pre-Textos, 2016), among others, in addition to the En la tumba de plaques. It is none other than Orfeo (Soto Zen Luz Serena Buddhist Society, 2014) and Light (at least advertising, 2018). He regularly collaborates with critical reviews in the journal Turia. Empty the Earth is his first foray into the narrative and a great first novel. Pérez Leal has chosen a complex story, not because of how important it is in itself, because there are hundreds, if not thousands, of cases like Mandelstam’s, but to add coherence to a void that has existed since the moment he disappeared. Divided into three parts: slaughterhouse, uprooting, and offal, the book remains a tribute to injustice, but it’s not just that. It is the reconstruction of fear and how one confronts it. Because unlike animals, we have the ability to destroy each other. Man is a wolf to man.