At a secret meeting in a Georgian seminary, teenaged students discuss forbidden secular texts away from the strict watch of the Russian priests. Among the teenagers  is “Soso” Djugashvili, a smaller than average, pockmarked, half-crippled boy with dreams of revolution. One of the boys approvingly quotes Marx, who sees human nature as the “product of our behaviour and not as its cause.” Soso, thinking of Darwin, disagrees, and says humans are more animal and instinctual. Soso, whose given name is Ioseb, or Joseph, would eventually change his last name to Stalin. The question young Soso wrestles with – whether human nature is something you are born with or something you create – lies at the heart of playwright Anton Piatigorsky’s fiction debut.

Each story in The Iron Bridge focuses on a different 20th-century dictator, offering a brief glimpse of an imagined moment in his childhood or young adulthood. Idi Amin appears as a cook for the King’s African Rifles, where he mulls over the failures of his mother, the tribal divides of an occupied country, and how to advance his career. A young Cambodian boy named Sâr, who will grow up to be Pol Pot, sneaks into the residence of the King’s second wives, and comes away from the experience feeling defiled. Mao Tse-tung, the arrogant son of an uncompromising and conservative landowner, refuses his filial role and his bride, causing chaos in the family. Adolph Hitler, arguably the most recognizable of Piatigorsky’s rogues’ gallery, makes his appearance in the final entry with a trip to the Linz opera; his story is infused with all the Sturm und Drang one would expect.

Piatigorsky never attempts to answer the question about human nature. Each of his characters is carefully constructed, and the reasons behind why they would go on to become menacing figures and murderers of such magnitude are left to the reader’s imagination. This is the strength of The Iron Bridge: the idea is not to explain, but to narrate. These are good stories – well-written, interesting, and engaging. The premise is not a gimmick, so much as a jumping-off point for the fiction. The Iron Bridge is an intriguing idea, well executed.