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editor
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 Posted: Tue Jun 10, 2008 1:27 pm Post subject: |
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Homage to Robert Frost
Hardcover
By Joseph Brodsky Ио́сиф Алекса́ндрович Бро́дский,
Seamus Heaney and
Derek Walcott
| Quote: | ... Tragedy, as you know, is always a fait accompli, whereas terror always has to do with anticipation, with man's recognition of his own negative potential - with his sense of what he is capable of. And it is the latter that was Frost's forte, not the former. In other words, his posture is radically different from the Continental tradition of the poet as tragic hero. And that difference alone makes him - for want of a better term - American.
On the surface, he looks very positively predisposed toward his surroundings - particularly toward nature. His fluency, indeed, his "being versed in country things" alone can produce this impression. However,k there is a difference between the way a European perceives nature and the way an American does. Addressing this difference, W.H. Auden, in his short essay on the poet), suggests something to the effect that when a European conceives of confronting nature, he walks out of his cottage or a little inn, filled with either friends or family, and goes for an evening stroll. If he encounters a tree, it's a tree made familiar by history, to which it's been a witness. This or that king sat underneath it, layhing down this or that law - something of that sort. A tree stabds there rustling, as it were, with allusions. Pleased and somewhat pensive, our man, refreshed but unchanged by that encounter, returns to his inn or cottage, finds his friends or family absolutely intact, and proceeds to have a good, merry time. Whereas when an American walks out of his house and encounters a tree it is a meeting of equals. Man and tree face each other in their respective primal power, free of references: neither has a past, and as to whose future is greater, it is a toss-up. Basically, it's epidermis meeting bark. Our man returns to his cabin in a state of bewilderment, to say the least, if not in actual shock or terror.
Now, this is obviously a romantic caricature, but it accentuates the features, and that's what I am after here. In any case, the second point could be safely billed as the gist of Robert Frost's nature poetry. Nature for this poet is neither friend nor fore, nor is it the backdrop for human drama; it is the poet's terrifying self-portrait. ... (On Grief and Reason, by Joseph Brodsky, pgs. 7-9) |
Literary heavyweights converge on one of America's best-loved poet laureates. The student's best guide to writing an essay on an individual poet or poem.
Do you agree?
| Quote: | COME IN
As I came to the edge of the woods,
Thrush music--- hark!
Now if it was dark outside,
Inside it was dark.
Too dark in the woods for a bird
By sleight of wing
To better its perch for the night,
Though it still could sing.
The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush's breast.
Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went--
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.
But no, I was out for stars:
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked,
And I hadn't been.
(-- p. 9) |
| Quote: | The Poetry of Robert Frost
Audio Cassette
Narrated by Various Artists, including
popular U.S. actors Elliot Gould and Alfre Woodard,
both of whom enjoy the gift of good diction.
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| Quote: | | All questions and comments gratefully received and posted. Send them to legal@pokerpulse.com. |
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editor
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| Posted: Tue Jun 10, 2008 2:37 pm Post subject: |
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From Losing Streak:
Nativity Poems
Hardcover
By Joseph Brodsky
Translated by Various Artists
| Quote: | CHRISTMAS BALLAD
For Evgeny Rein, with love
There floats in an abiding gloom,
among immensities of brick,
a little boat of night: it seems
to sail through Alexander Park.
It's just a lonely streetlamp, though,
a yellow rose against the night,
for lovers strolling down below
the busy street.
There floats in an abiding gloom
a drone of bees: men drunk, asleep.
In the dark capital a lone
tourist takes another snap.
Now out onto Ordynka turns
a taxicab, with sickly faces;
dead men lean into the arms
of the low houses.
The floats in the abiding gloom
a poet in sorrow; over here
a round-faced man sells kerosene,
the sad custodian of his store.
Along a dull deserted street
an old Lothario hurries. Soon
the midnight-riding newlyweds
sail through the gloom.
There floats in outer Moscow one
who swims at random to his loss,
and Jewish accents wander down
a dismal yellow flight of stairs.
From love toward unhappiness,
to New Year's Eve, to Sunday, floats
a good-time girl: she can't express
what's lost inside.
Cold evening floats within your eyes
and snow is fluttering on the panes
of carriages; the wind is ice
and pale, it seals your reddened palms.
Evening lights like honey seep;
the scent of halvah's everywhere,
as Christmas Eve lifts up its sweet-
meats in the air.
Now drifting on a dark-blue wave
across the city's gloomy sea,
there floating by, your New Year's Eve --
as if life could restart, could be
a thing of light with each day lived
successfully, and food to eat,
-- as if, life having rolled to left,
it could roll right.
1962
Translated by Glyn Maxwell
(-- pgs. 5-6) |
| Quote: | ... ''Nativity Poems'' collects the poems Joseph Brodsky produced most winter seasons starting in 1962, when he was a ratty 22-year-old dissident haunting the St. Petersburg cafes until the K.G.B. hauled him off to a labor camp. The last was written in 1995, a few months before his death, after a quarter-century of flaming and desolate exile in the United States. Here he became poet laureate. Universities competed to hire him. The Nobel Prize duly arrived. His fellow Nobel poets loved him, translated him, drank with him, stayed up late with him and eulogized him when his heart failed; not broken, perhaps, but certainly overcompressed.
The first Christmases in this collection find Brodsky in his early mode of dark rebellion. It was a difficult condition in many ways, among them of course the labor camp years. Yet to a writer it offered a kind of bulwark. The Soviet Union was granite oppression and provided an unbudging gritty mass to strike a poetic match against.
''You get a sense of superiority rather easily,'' Brodsky recalled years later in the United States. ''You are working against such obvious notions of vulgarity; and the state is there in a kind of obvious grandeur. You identify yourself as the good, and you may be the worst possible.''
Several of the early poems here tend to reflect this odd mixture of pain and an arrogance that could almost be called satiric complacency. The poetry sometimes breaches it, as in ''Christmas Ballad'' (1962), whose mordant portrait of a joyless St. Petersburg winter lifts with images that fly above it. Of a streetlight: ''There floats in an abiding gloom/ among immensities of brick,/ a little boat of night.'' (From BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Christmas Verses Begin In Early, Dark Rebellion by Richard Eder in The New York Times Dec. 19/01) |
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editor
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| Posted: Wed Jun 11, 2008 3:57 pm Post subject: |
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Young Stalin
Hardcover
By Simon Sebag Montefiore
| Quote: | Stalin's pre-Revolutionary achievements and crimes were much greater than we knew. For the first time, we can document his role in the bank-robberies, protection-rackets, extortion, arson, piracy murder - the political gangsterism - that impressed Lenin and trained Stalin the very skills that would prove invaluable in the political jungle of the Soviet Union. But we can also show that he was much more than a gangster godfather: he was also a political organizer, enforcer, and master at infiltrating the Tsarist security services. In contrast to Zinoviev, Kamenev or Bukharin, whose reputations as great politicans are ironically founded on their destruction in the Terror, he was not afraid to take physical risks. But he also impressed Lenin as an independent and thoughtful politician, and as a vigorous editor and journalist, who was never afraid to confront and contradict the older man. Stalin's success was at least partly due to his unusal combination of education (thanks to the Seminary) and stree violence; he was that rare combination: both 'intellectual' and killer. No wonder in 1917 Lenin turned to Stalin as the ideal lieutenant for his violent, beleaguered Revolution.
This book is the result of almost ten years of research on Stalin in twenty-three cities and nine countries, mainly in the newly opened archives of Moscow, Tbilisi and Batumi, but also in St Petersburg, Baku, Vologda, Siberia, Berlin, Stockholm, London, Paris, Tampere, Helsinki, Cracaw, Vienna and Stanford, California. (From the Introduction, pgs. xix-xx) |
| Quote: | 'Little Stalin boxed and wrestled with a certain success, agrees Davrichewy. (footnote omitted) His singing teacher observed him setting up wrestling matches, but once he hurt *his already fragile arm. 'It started as a wrestling match then turned into real boxing,' recounts the master, 'and they beat each other up.' ...
The boys' real energies were reserved for gang-warfare. 'The girls of our hometown were organized into gangs based on the streets or quarter where they lived,. These bands were in constant warfare' - though they were melting-pots too. 'Gori's kids were educated together in the street without distinction of religion, nationality or fortune.' A ragamuffin like Stalin played in the streets with the son of Prince Amilakhvari - a famous general - who tried to teach him to swim. The children, armed with knives, bows and arrows, or catapults, led a blissfully free if wild existence: they swam in the river, they sang their favourite songs, pillaged apples from Prince Amilakhvari's orchard, mischevously ranging across the countryside. Once Stalin set the Prince's orchards alight. ...
The streetfighting was legitimate not just because Goreli parents joined in the annual brawls and bet on the wrestling-bouts but because the boys were playing the Georgian bandit-heroes who fought the Russians in the nearby mountains. But now the schoolboys found themselves persecuted by the Russian Empire even at school. (From Brawlers, Wrestlers and Choirboys, pgs. 32-34) |
| Quote: | | *Note: This damaged left arm is variously blamed on a sledge accident, a birth defect, a childhood infection, a restling injury, a fight over a woman in Chiatura, a carriage accident and a beating from his father, all (except for the birth defect) suggested by Stalin himself. There is much confusion about Stalin's probably because there were in fact two accidents: there was this, less serious accident when he had just started school (according to Keke)(hit by a phaeton maybe while playing a popular game of 'chicken,' in which boys would grab the axle of galloping carriages) or aged six (according to later health reports) which probably damaged the arm, an injury that became more noticeable in old age. Then, not long afterwards, there was a much graver accident in which he was seriously hurt and for which he needed treatment in Tiflis: this dmaged his legs. In her memoirs Keke, aged eithy, seems to merge them together. (From Crazy Beso, p. 28) |
| Quote: | When the new prisoner arrived in Baku's Bailov Prison wearing a blue-satin smock and a dashing Caucasian hood, the other political prisoners passed the word to be careful. 'This is secret,' they whispered. 'That is Koba!' They feared Stalin 'more than the police.'
The bogeyman did not disappoint. He had the 'ability quietly to incite others while he himself remained on the sidelines. The sly schemer did not spurn any means necessary but managed to avoid public responsibility.' In his seven months at the famous Bailovka, set amid the oilfields, Stalin dominated its power structures. He read, studied Esperanto, which he regarded as the language of the future,' and stirred up a series of witchhunts for traitors that often ended in death. His reign at the Bailovka was a microcosm of his dictatorship of Russia. ...
Stalin still preferred rogues to revolutionaries. He was 'always seen in the company of cutthroats, blackmailers, robbers and the gunslingers - the Mauserists.' Sometimes the criminal prisoners raided the politicals, but the Georgian criminals, probably organized by Stalin, served as their bodyguards. In power, he shocked his comrades by promoting criminals in the NKVD, but he had used criminals all his life.
These two species came together to bet on prison games such as wrestling competitions and louse-racing. Stalin did not like chess but 'He and Sergo Ordzhonikidze often played backgammon all night.' The cruellest game was 'Madness' in which a young prisoner was placed in the criminals' cell to be driven mad. Bets were taken on how long it would take for the youngster to crack up. Sometimes the victim really did go crazy. (From Louse-Racing, Murder and Madness - Prison Games, pgs. 173-175) |
| Quote: | On 24 September, Kamo and Tsintsadze, with Kupriashvili and about eighteen gunmen, ambushed the mail coach three miles outside Tiflis. The highwaymen tossed bombs at the poolice and Cossacks: three policemen and a postilion were killed. A fourth policeman was wounded but opened fire on the bank-robbers. The hold-up escalated into a brutal firefight. The gunmen failed to grab the money; the Cossacks rallied. When the Outfit eventually retreated, the Cossacks gave chase but Tsintsadze and Kupriashvili, both crack shots, covered their retreat, picking off seven Cossacks in a galloping battle down the Kadzhorskoe Highway.
It was the last bow of the Outfit. Kamo was tracked down to his hideout with eighteen of his gangsters. They were arrested. Kamo received four death sentences.
'I'm resigned to death," Kamo wrote to Tsintsadze, 'I'm absolutely calm. On my grave there should already be grass growing six feet high. One can't escape death for ever. One must die one day. But I'll try my luck once more and perhaps one day, we'll laugh at our enemies again... This seemed highly unlikely. ...
Once again, Kamo cheated the noose, benefiting from the brad amnesty of Nicholas II on the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty in 1913. Kamo remained in jail for five years but lived to meet up again with Stalin and play out the ultimate insane violence after the Revolution. ... (From The Escapist: Kamo's Leap and the Last Bank-Robbery, pgs. 216-217) |
| Quote: | | Petrograd in October 1917 seemed calm, but beneath the glossy surface the city danced in a trance of last pleasures. 'Gambling clubs functioned hectically from dusk till dawn,' reported John Reed, 'with champagne flowing and stakes of 20,000 roubles. In the centre of the city at night, prostitutes in jewels and expensive furs walked up and down and crowded the cafes...Hold-ups increased to such an extent that it was dangerous to walk the streets.' Russia wrote Ilya Ehrenburg, later one of Stalin's favoured writers, 'lived as if on a railway platform, waiting for the guard's whistle.' Aristocrats sold priceless treasures on the streets, the food shortages worsened, queues lengthened, while the rich still dined at Donon's and Constant's, the two smartest restaurants, and the bourgeois vied for tickets to hear Chaliapin sing. (From 1917 Winter: The Countdown, p. 288) |
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editor
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| Posted: Mon Sep 01, 2008 10:15 am Post subject: |
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From Losing Streak:
Harper's
Magazine Subscription
Paper Pushkin
[Resignation]
September, 2008
| Quote: | From two 1824 letters by Aleksandr Pushkin to Aleksandr Kaznacheev. The first is in response to an assignment to investigate the extermination of locusts that Pushkin refused to undertake; the second concerns his resignation from the Russian Foreign Ministry, where he worked for seven years. The letters are included in Pushkin: Documents Toward a Biography 1799–1829, published last year in Russia by Iskusstvo. Count Woronzof, the deputy authority of the province of Bessarabia, was Pushkin’s boss. Kaznacheev was the head of Woronzof’s chancellery. Pushkin later admitted to a friend that he lied about his aneurysm in order to gain his freedom. Translated from the Russian and the French by Simona Schneider.
Esteemed Aleksandr Ivanovich,
Bureaucratic procedure is entirely foreign to me. I don't even know if I have the right to respond to His Higness's orders. Whatever may happen, I trust in your indulgence and must dare to give an honest explanation of my situation.
For seven years I was remiss in my duties: I did not author a single paper, I did not communicate with any superior. These seven years, as you well know, were totally wasted. Complaints would be inappropriate on my part. I set obstacles in my own path and chose a different goal. For God's sake, don't think that I looked upon poetic creation with the childish vanity of a rhymester or as a sensitive man's respite: it is simply my craft, an honest type of industry, which earns me my livelihood and independence. I think Count Woronzof won't wish to deprive me of either the former or the latter.
I'll be told that because I receive 700 rubles a year I am obliged to serve. You know that it is possible to be part of the book trade only in Moscow or Saint Petersburg, as the journalists, censors, and booksellers are there; I constantly have to decline the most advantageous offers for the sole reason that I am located far away from the capital. It suits the government to compensate me for my losses in some way, and thus I receive those 700 rubles not as a functionary's salary but as the allowance of an exiled prisoner. I amprepared to refuse them if I cannot be in control of my own time and occupation. I'm going into these details because I value the opinion of Count Woronzof, as I do yours, as I do the opinion of any honest person.
I know this letter is enough to destroy me, as they say.
(If the Count orders me to send in my resignation, I am ready; but I feel that I am losing a lot and am not expecting to gain anything.)
One last word: you perhaps are not aware that I have an aneurysm. For eight years already I have been carrying death with me. I can show evidence from my doctor. Is it really not possible to leave me in peace for the remainder of my life, which surely won't be prolonged?
Please accept my deepest respect and heartfelt devotion.
Staff Secretary
Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
(-- pgs. 27-28) |
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editor
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| Posted: Fri Jan 02, 2009 9:20 am Post subject: |
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Vanity Fair
Magazine Subscription
Dead Soul
Chosen as Russia's next leader by Boris Yeltsin's inner circle in 1999, Vladimir Putin appeared to be a blank slate on which his supporters, his country, and the world could write their desires. Few saw what he really was, or the way he brutally erased his footprints on the climb to power. Fewer still have survived to decode him. As Russian forces bend Georgia to their will, Masha Gessen tells how one small, faceless man - backed by the vast secret-police machine that formed him - took control of the world's largest country
October, 2008
| Quote: | Putin was himself in no hurry to leave the K.G.B., and he would continue to draw a K.G.B. salary—indeed, the salary was more than he earned at city hall. Before long Putin had made himself the mayor's point man for business of all sorts. In particular, he was attempting to gain control of the emerging gaming industry. In the end, he succeeded in securing for the city a 51 per cent share of all of St, Petersburg's casinos—but this, he later claimed, did nothing for the city's coffers, because casino managers ran with the cash. Something similar, he said, also happened with federal credits the city was supposed to use to stimulate food imports in the early1990s: he claimed that the private companies contracted by the city vanished with the money. The 1992 investigation by the (deputy Marina) Salye commission drew a different conclusion: the partnerships with private companies were structured in such a way as to siphon money with impunity.
This was not the only allegation of misconduct leveled against Putin: in 1999 the St. Petersburg prosecutor's officel aunched an investigation into the alleged misappropriation of some $4.5 million earmarked for reconstruction projects; the investigation was closed in August 2000, after Putin became president. One of the investigators on the case has since joined a monastery—another form of internal exile—while the other has retired. Everyone named by the investigation now has a top government position—including Russia's current president, Dmitry Medvedev, who, if the prosecutors are to be believed, was the man who actually engineered the transfers of earmarked funds.
Scorched Earth in St. Petersburg
It was as deputy mayor that Putin finally got to play the roles he had yearned for as achild; he was both a shadow ruler and a thug. Here he was, a buttoned-down bureaucrat, making and breaking businesses and careers, now allowing the future oligarch Berezovskyto open up a car dealership in St, Petersburg and magnanimously waving away a bribe, now grabbing a controlling share of all the casinos in the city. He made enemies, and these enemies apparently wanted to kill him.I n 1994, Putin's wife's car was broadsided in a hit-and-run collision that everyone interpreted as an assassination attempt, Lyudmila Putin survived major spinal injuries, but her recovery took years. Putin began sleeping with a pump riñe, saying, "It may not save me, but it calms me down."None of this was particularly unusual in the chaotic, crime-ridden Russia of the mid-1990s. (-- p. 383) |
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editor
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| Posted: Sat Jan 31, 2009 10:24 am Post subject: |
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Regarding the Pain of Others
Hardcover
By Susan Sontag
| Quote: | Thirteen Russian soldiers in bulky winter uniforms and high boots are scattered about a pocked, blood-splashed slope lined with loose rocks and the litter of war: shell casings, crumpled metal, a boot that holds the lower part of a leg...The scene might be a revised version of the end of Gance's J'accuse, when the dead soldiers from the First World War rise from their graves, but these Russian conscripts, slaughtered in the Soviet Union's own late folly of a colonial war, were never buried. A few still have their helmets on. The head of one kneeling figure, talking animatedly, foams with his red brain matter. The atmosphere is warm, convivial, fraternal. Some slouch, leaning on an elbow, or sit, chatting, their opened skulls and destroyed hands on view. One man bends over another who lies on his side as if asleep, perhaps encouraging him to sit up. Three men are horsing around: one with a huge wound in his belly straddles another, lying prone, who is laughing at a third man, on his knees, who playfully dangles before him a strip of flesh. One soldier, helmeted, legless, has turned to a comrade some distance away, an alert smile on his face. Below him are two who don't seem quite up to the resurrection and lie supine, their bloodied heads hanging down the stony incline.
Engulfed by the image, which is so accusatory, one could fatasize that the soldiers might turn and talk to us. But no, no one is looking out of the picture. There's no threat of protest. They are not about to yell at us to bring a halt to that abomination which is war. They haven't come back to life in order to stagger off to denounce the war-makers who sent them to kill and be killed. And they are not represented as terrifying to others, for among them (far left) sits a white-garbed Afghan scavenger, entirely absorbed in going through somebody's kit bag, of whom they take no note, and entering the picture above them (top right) on the path winding down the slope are two Afghans, perhaps soldiers themselves, who, it would seem from the Kalashnikovs collected near their feet, have already stripped the dead soldiers of their weapons. These dead are supremely uninterested in the living: in those who took their lives; in witnesses - and in us. Why should they seek our gaze? What would they have to say to us? "We" - this "we" is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through - don't understand. We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right. (Closing paragraphs, pgs. 124-126) |
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editor
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| Posted: Sun Sep 20, 2009 4:16 pm Post subject: |
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From Loaded Dice:
Beria, My Father
Inside Stalin's Kremlin
Hardcover
By Sergo Beria
Edited by Françoise Thom
English Translation by Brian Pearce
| Quote: | My father respected the individual but not the crowd. He taught me never to go along with the desires of the masses. I did not understand him at the time, but today I think he was right. One certainly ought not to impose on them anything totally alien to their aspirations, but neither ought one to follow their wishes where state policy was concerned, because they always looked for an immediate result. Yet there are measures that are good for the masses though they run contrary to their desires. According to my father, most people have no time for ideology. For them having enough to eat, having a roof over their heads and living quietly with their families matters more than anything else. That minimum has to be ensured for them before entering into ideological subtleties. People must not be treated like cattle. The individual must be given at least the illusion of freedom. We must not forget that, at that time, three-quarters of the Soviet people were bound to their collective farm and had no right to leave them.
My father was a deeply unhappy man. His character drove him to creativity. He avoided intrigues and manoeuvres in the apparatus, seeking refuge in domains in which he could build. He told me that one must always try to find something interesting in every occupation, and for him this meant finding a possibility to create. He had a very little satisfaction in his life, since the only field in which he was allowed to deploy his talents was that of armaments, instruments of destruction. In a word, I pity him. What has he left behind him? A dreadful reputation, and the atomic bomb in the hands of those wretches. (From The masses, p. 296) |
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