Bogdanov, Gorki and Lenin, playing chess in Capri (1908)
=By= Gaither Stewart
A bit of Lenin before breakfast gives you the strength of a hundred camels in the courtyard. (My adaptation of a Paul Bowles’ Arab adage)
(Rome) Il signore Drin Drin, Capri fishermen called Lenin in 1910 and 1912 when the revolutionary and his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya visited the Russian writer Maxim Gorky in his villa on the now famous island near Naples. Lenin did not speak Italian but he had heard the men he learned to fish with use a word he understood as drin drin (in Italian the onomatopoeia associated with ring or buzz) so the day he felt a bite on his pole, he shouted “drin drin.” Thus Vladimir Ilyich acquired his only known non-revolutionary nickname.
