Short Fiction Review
The Iron Bridge
by Anton Piatigorsky
Goose Lane Editions
272 pages, $19.95
Is the seed of future evils planted in children before they have even had a chance to grow? Do tyrants share qualities that are fundamental to their psychological and social makeups? Can decades of cruelty be whittled down and attributed to a single short story? Is the difference between good men and bad men made, or born? Or, put another way, (in fact, put on the jacket), “Is it possible to reconcile the mind of a youth with the actions of a monster?“ These are only some of the probing questions that Anton Piatigorsky’s collection of short stories, The Iron Bridge, provokes, but does not explicitly answer. Each story focuses on a fictional episode in the youth of six boys who will become history’s most reviled villains: Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Mao Tse-Tung, Josef Stalin, Rafael Trujillo, and Adolf Hitler.
Though very readable as individual snapshots, the collection is more impressive when read as a single work. The short stories build on each other towards a slow and playful payoff, so that the questions they raise become clearer and clearer over the course of the book, though the answers only fleetingly so. Piatigorsky’s stories are fictional, but they come to life as earnestly as if they were true: his characters are so well-drawn that the scenes played out by the adolescent Mao, and young Soso Stalin, and finally a sulky and explosive Hitler, do indeed seem very real, very possible. Each story is a highly developed character sketch, weakened only ever so slightly by too much self-consciousness in the inner monologues of the young dictators-to-be. Though the stories share a kind of pattern, they each have a distinct mood, and Piatigorsky does a beautiful job of setting the stage for each episode in a way that makes every one a new and exhilarating foray into these vulnerable and volatile psychological spaces. The Iron Bridge doesn’t try to use fiction to explain history; instead it imagines a moment made possible in retrospect by the terrible and brutal reality of history. Therefore, though the stories do sometimes humanize historical figures we may be more comfortable keeping at a safe distance, Piatigorsky seems to take on the particularly daunting task of tracing the monster back to a humanity that is at the same time compatible with the terror each man is responsible for.
Thankfully, Piatigorsky isn’t involved in any psychological confrontation with his readers: the collection is highly readable, and exciting, and the motif of the young dictator and the issues this raises aren’t an aggressive affront to the reader – instead the collection is an enjoyable experience, with significant pay-off. Even when you want to look away, you don’t really want to. An added benefit to this kind of fiction when it is as well-done as this collection is, is its invigoration of history, perhaps inspiring readers who are unfamiliar with the worst tyrants of the 20th century to do their own outside research into men who are made all the more terrifying by the reminder that they were once children and young adults. Though the episodes are not historical truths, the depth and sophistication of Piatigorsky’s portraits suggests he has done extensive research and given each character very thorough study before releasing them into the scene – the characters are subtle, their thoughts and dialogue believable, their feelings and reactions familiar, and, sometimes, even horrifyingly relatable.
This collection is an engaging and active read that shouldn’t be taken to task for issues of historical accuracy: it’s an experience in imagination, and in getting satisfaction, even if only briefly, out of questions that plague and torment us. We will surely never know what made these men capable of such horrific cruelty, nor what will make future men and women commit atrocities yet to come, but Piatigorsky successfully gives us the glimpse at possibilities, giving us something to explore through fiction in a way that reality cannot.
