SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
A ship steams into New York Harbor in the first weeks of 1917, and a little boy named Sergei tells his father, Lev, that some of the buildings look so tall, they seem to scrape the sky. They are built on the skeletons of workers, his father tells him, then adds, you should be making revolution. Lev Bronshtein, whom history and the world would know as Leon Trotsky, is at the center of Robert Littell's new novel, "Bronshtein In The Bronx," set in the 10 weeks that the Russian revolutionary leader spent in exile in New York City, just before Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik communists took power in Russia. Robert Littell, who has written more than 20 espionage bestsellers, including "The Company," joins us now from Morocco. Mr. Littell, thanks so much for being with us.
ROBERT LITTELL: Well, it's amazing that I am, because I've never used this kind of technology before. But it's a lot of fun.
SIMON: Well, we're glad to be the first. You have a kind of feel, a kind of personal family interest in Trotsky, don't you?
LITTELL: Yes. I certainly did. I think what happened was I inherited my father's obsession with Bronshtein Trotsky. My father was born in 1896, and his birth name was Leon Litsky. And in 1919, when he was 23 years old, he filed papers in a New York courthouse to change his family name legally to Littell. And he had to give the judge a reason. And he told the judge that he had been subjected to enormous amount of ridicule because of the similarity of his name, which was Leon Litsky, to a Bolshevik revolutionist who was in New York, named Leon Trotsky. And the judge must have laughed and said, sure.
SIMON: What intrigued you about this 10-week period in Trotsky's life?
LITTELL: Oh, so many things. I mean, he came to the new world hoping to spark a socialist revolution. He lived in the Bronx. He commuted on the Third Avenue Elevated down to Greenwich Village, where he worked out of a basement, writing editorials for a very small Russian-language newspaper called Novoye Vremya. He was extremely disappointed by the fact that the American workers weren't reacting to him the way he expected.
I mean, Trotsky thought that if he could start a revolution anywhere - it didn't matter where; Germany, France, England, Russia, America - that it would be contagious, and the workers of the world, in other countries, would take their cue from the revolution he started and rise up. And it didn't happen in America. It turned out that the American workers, the American proletariat, in 1917, was much more interested in getting a bigger piece of the capitalist pie. They wanted shorter work weeks and shorter workdays. They wanted paid vacations. Can you imagine in 1917, going on strike for paid vacations? But Trotsky didn't understand it. He wanted revolution in America, and it was February 1917. In my telling of the story, he was very depressed because he wasn't getting the reaction he needed.
SIMON: Let me ask you about those weeks in 1917. There was a crowd to meet Trotsky when he docked, wasn't there?
LITTELL: No, no. He was very well known already. At the age of 26, he presided over the first Soviet and Russian means council. It's the 1905 revolution. So he was a young world-class revolutionary when he landed in New York already. He had been in the czar's jail in Siberia. He had escaped on a sled drawn by reindeer - 1,000-mile trek to freedom and to leave Russia. He had been wandering around Europe for years, and he was a known entity.
SIMON: And you have J. Edgar Hoover making, what we'd nowadays call, a cameo appearance.
LITTELL: Yes.
SIMON: Is it based on a real encounter?
LITTELL: No, no. That's a novelistic encounter. I am - J. Edgar Hoover was starting out to work for the - for this government organization. And he was beginning his career, and we know where that went, eventually. So I just imagined that these federal offices, why couldn't it be J. Edgar Hoover who was greeting Trotsky and his entree in America.
SIMON: You carve out a role for Trotsky's conscience, even give the conscience a name.
LITTELL: Yeah. The conscience's name is the name of my father because I always felt that this was my father getting his revenge on Trotsky. My father didn't like Trotsky at all. I remember comments that he made later in life, that he was appalled at what he called the ends-justify-means brutality of Trotsky, which he demonstrated when he created and ran the Red Army during the Russian Civil War that followed the Bolshevik Revolution. The conscience is, to me, a key character in the novel, because I wondered where the idealism that must have functioned in Trotsky when he was young, what happened to it? Why did he become so brutal? Why did he become a killer? Why did he become the person he became and that the world thinks of today?
Freud called the conscience the poetry of the unconscious. It said it's the little voice in our heads that helps us navigate the complexity of life. At one point, in my telling of the tale, Trotsky's conscience quit him, and he went back to Russia after the first February Revolution with the ouster of the czar. He went back to Russia with all the other Bolsheviks coming from all over the world, and he had no conscience anymore.
SIMON: But, your novel does keep raising that question - can you make a boy - I apologize for twisting this metaphor, but can you make a revolutionary omelet without breaking eggs?
LITTELL: (Laughter) That's a lovely question. What can I tell you? Revolutions are violent enterprises, and eggs will always be broken.
SIMON: Yeah. After spending all this time with Leon Trotsky, how do you wind up feeling about him? Did he move the needle of your heart, even a little?
LITTELL: No. I'm more interested in him than like him. I don't like him very much. He became much too violent for my personal taste. And as I say, I think his conscience abandoned him, because he did some awful things when he got power. And after that, his struggle against Stalin, one always takes the side of anybody who was against Stalin.
SIMON: Robert Littell's new novel, "Bronshtein In The Bronx." Thank you so much for being with us.
LITTELL: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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