How many life-enhancing stories lie beneath the pavement of parking lots, unknown to the masses as they draw the keys from the ignition and rush off to the shops? A carpark in Stalingrad hides the site of the remarkable statue in the photo above, one that was familiar to the World War II generation and keeps insinuating itself, sometimes quite subliminally, into movies.
It’s a picture worth at least 10,000 words, though you don’t need to know the background story to be enthralled by the horrific juxtaposition of youngsters at play in the wreckage of battle.
This was “Children’s Khorovod”, more commonly known as the Barmaley Fountain, and it sat in front of the Museum of Defense of Tsaritsyn. The name of its creator seems to have been misplaced by history, but its inspiration was a poem of the same name by Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky (1882-1969), who was a fine critic of adult literature before turning his hand to fairytales for the little ones.
Chukovsky began as a journalist in Odessa, covered the London front, and translated Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain for his countrymen’s entertainment, but he won their hearts completely with a 1916 children’s book called “Krokodil”. More such followed, including 1923’s “The Giant Roach”.
Evidently his shtick was scaring the daylights out of the kiddies. “Children’s Khorovod” reads in part (courtesy of Wikipedia):
Little children!
For nothing in the world
Go to Africa.
Do not go to Africa for a walk!
In Africa, there are sharks,
In Africa, there are gorillas,
In Africa, there are large
Evil crocodiles.
They will bite you,
Beat and offend you!
Don’t you go, children,
to Africa for a walk.
In Africa, there is a robber,
In Africa, there is a villain,
In Africa, there is terrible
Bahr-mah-ley!
He runs about Africa
And eats children!
Nasty, vicious, greedy Barmaley!
But in Africa there was also the good Doctor Aybolit, who was in the process of being roasted alive by Barmaley when a gorilla appeared carrying a crocodile.
At the doctor’s request, the croc gobbled down Barmaley to ensure the local children’s safety, but then spit him up again when he promised to mend his ogrish ways.
Barmaley kept his word and even began treating the kids to pastries, which is definitely something to dance about.
Was Barmaley Stalin, devouring whole provinces? Chukovsky got away with flaunting the Communist Party’s strictures against discussing troublemakers like Boris Pasternak and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and stashed away the manuscripts of banned writers. Somehow he still earned the Lenin Prize in 1962, and after he died his daughter kept his “counter-revolutionary” flame alive.
It was, of course, Nazism, not Leninism, that shredded the Stalingrad landscape, and photographer Emmanuil Evzerikhin was there to memorialise the sad scene.
The fountain was rebuilt after the war, then moved elsewhere, and then presumably died in lonesome decay, but memories of it, bizarre enough at the outset and seared into the consciousness by Evzerikhin’s photos, wouldn’t disappear.
It had a starring role in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s 2001 war film “Enemy at the Gates” and the more recent, rather daft “V for Vendetta”, but most interestingly, Stanley Kubrick incorporated glimpses of it into the rapid-cut sequence that droog anti-hero Alex is forced to watch in “A Clockwork Orange” in a bid to wean him from his beloved “ultra-violence”.
There are more pictures of the fountain on the occasionally fascinating website EnglishRussia.com.
