Bolsheviki: A Dead Serious Comedy

Set in a Montreal bar on Remembrance Day, Bolsheviki recounts stories from the trenches of the First World War, as told by veteran Harry "Rosie" Rollins to reporter Jerry Nines. Rosie's meandering monologue delivers a blistering de-glorification of war as it shifts between his wartime recollections and the present day. The veteran's clattering, fast-paced description of life--and death--on the Western Front reproduces the chaotic sounds and rhythms of battle. Rosie recalls men pissing their pants, losing limbs--and officers "who stayed nice and dry in the deep dugout" while soldiers sat in the trenches with "nose cold ears cold feet cold dicks cold." When news breaks out about the revolution in Russia, it spreads like an electric shock--that Russian soldiers were deserting en masse in their millions. Rosie tells of the plan to mutiny on those men who generaled the slaughter of seventeen million men in a purposeless war: "We knew then what we had to do ... put an end to the war before it put an end to us." This cutting-edge drama, profoundly in opposition to conventional histories of Canadian troops in the First World War, debunks every sentimental notion of duty, heroism, and warfare.--Cover, p. [4].