Just enough of rain
To bring the smell of silk
From the umbrellas

The haiku is by Richard Wright whose books are being reissued by HarperCollins. From an article by James Campbell in the TLS.

This is what I found in the toilet of my friends’ apartment this weekend. A copy of the TLS , with a piece entitled “Laughing at Lenin,” that begins thus:

One thing got better in the Soviet Union under Communism: the humour. In the days just after the Revolution, they used to laugh at jokes like this:

An old peasant woman is visiting Moscow Zoo, when she sets eyes on a camel for the first time. “Oh my God,” she says, “look at what the Bolsheviks have done to that horse.”

However, as things got progressively worse, the jokes–anekdoty–became better. Ben Lewis has written “a history of communism through Communist jokes,” under the suitably ridiculous title Hammer & Tickle. Many of the jokes were about people being sent to prison for telling jokes:

A judge is sitting in the courtroom, convulsed with laughter. “What’s so funny?” asks the clerk. “I just heard the funniest joke of my life.” The clerk asks him to repeat it. “I can’t. I just sentenced someone to five years’ hard labour for doing that.”

Also, check this out. (Thanks, Linta)