Description
The story is a satirical folk tale that begins when Emperor Alexander I and his Cossack aide Platov visit England. The English craftsmen, wishing to impress the Tsar, present a marvelous, minute steel flea (a clockwork trinket) that can dance.
After Alexander’s death, the next Tsar, Nicholas I, challenges his own countrymen to outperform this foreign wonder. Platov, insistent on Russia’s superior craftsmanship, takes the flea to the legendary gunsmiths of Tula.
Three Tula craftsmen—led by the cross-eyed, left-handed master known only as Lefty (Levsha)—lock themselves away. When they finally emerge, they hand Platov the flea, which now refuses to move. Platov, furious, drags Lefty to the Tsar, believing the men have failed.
However, a closer look through a microscope reveals their secret: Lefty and his companions have successfully shod the tiny flea with minuscule horseshoes, each bearing the engraved signature of the Tula artisans. The work is so fine that Lefty himself made the nails, which are too small to be seen.
Lefty is then sent to England to demonstrate this feat and study their methods. Despite the English trying to convince him to stay, he yearns for home. On his neglected return, he falls ill and dies in a poor hospital, a tragedy that highlights the Tsarist state’s negligence toward its most brilliant common people.
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We have no secrets. We just have secrets of the trade.
The English are the best artisans in the world, and they have the most advanced machines, but in the end, everything comes down to God and a talented individual.
The English cannot understand our soul, our faith, or our art.
No matter how fine the machine, it cannot replace the hand of a man who crosses himself before beginning his work.
He was a man with a pure Russian soul and a talent given by God.
Chapter One
When Emperor Alexander Pavlovich finished the Congress of Vienna, he desired to travel through Europe and see wonders in various states. He toured all the countries, and everywhere, through his affability, he always had the most harmonious conversations with all sorts of people, and everyone tried to amaze him with something and win him over to their side. But with him was the Don Cossack Platov, who did not like this ‘winning over’ and, missing his own household, kept urging the Sovereign to return home. As soon as Platov noticed that the Sovereign was highly interested in something foreign, all the accompanying persons would remain silent, but Platov would immediately say: so and so, we have something of our own at home that is no worse—and would distract him with something.
The English knew this, and for the Sovereign’s arrival, they invented various tricks to captivate him with foreign novelty and draw him away from the Russians, and in many cases, they achieved this, especially in large gatherings where Platov could not speak French fluently; but he was little interested in this, because he was a married man and considered all French conversations as trifles not worth imagining. But when the English began inviting the Sovereign to all their armories, weapons collections, and soap-and-sawing factories, to demonstrate and boast of their superiority over us in all things—Platov said to himself:
“Well, that’s enough. I’ve tolerated it until now, but I can’t any further. Whether I can speak or not, I won’t betray my own people.”
And no sooner had he said this to himself than the Sovereign told him:
“So and so, tomorrow you and I are going to see their armory Kunstkamera. There,” he said, “are such perfections of nature that once you see them, you will no longer argue that we Russians, with our significance, are good for nothing.”
Platov did not reply to the Sovereign, but merely pulled his gnarled nose down into his shaggy burka (felt cloak), and when he arrived at his lodgings, he ordered his orderly to fetch a flask of Caucasian vodka-kizlyarka from the cellar, drained a good glass, prayed to God before his travel icon, covered himself with his burka, and snored so loudly that none of the English in the entire house could sleep.
He thought: the morning is wiser than the night.
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