“At least six hundred published authors were arrested during the Great Terror, that is, almost a third of the members of the Union of Soviet Writers. They are all to be pitied as human beings. There weren’t all that many major writers among them; many of the figures were party workers first and foremost, `moonlighting’ as writers. The cultural damage, however, cannot be calculated only by the number of arrested and executed geniuses; the corrosive atmosphere of omnipresent fear, suspicion, uncertainty, and epidemic levels of informing and self-censorship of the Great Terror fatally poisoned the moral climate.”
This is from the recently published The Magical Chorus: The History of Russian Culture from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn by Solomon Volkov. It covers the grand, dispiriting arc of Russia’s artists in literature, painting, music, dance, theater and film from the reign of Tsar Nicholas II to Vladimir Putin’s ascension eight years ago. Through happy serendipity, I read the words above shortly after paying one of my periodic visits to Poets Against War. On its home page appears a commentary by the group’s founder, Sam Hamill, who writes:
“As any reasonable student of history must admit, the United States government is, and for more than a century has been, the world’s most accomplished terrorist organization.”
A few paragraphs later he writes:
“It is time to declare an end to `the American century,’ time to face our own history of demagoguery and hegemony. We who are poets are among the most literate people of our nation. We owe it to our country and to the world to become better citizens of this world, to stand for truth and compassion in the face of terror and mass murder.”
I count four factual errors in those three sentences. Most annoyingly self-congratulatory is the second, which a cursory look at PAW’s poetry archive quickly refutes. Sputtering self-righteousness is not poetry. Osip Mandelstam is poetry. Volkov writes of him:
“It all ended predictably: a repeated arrest (on the denunciations of zealous colleagues) and a martyr’s demise in the camps, where the crazed Mandelstam, dressed in rags and plagued by lice, offered to read his anti-Stalinist poetry to prisoners for a hunk of bread.”
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5 comments:
You are so right. You know perfectly well that if these people had to face what Mandelstam, Akhmatova and Pasternak faced they would cave in a minute.
Mr. Hamill needs to take a look at this site:
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm
MM
Let's not forget Isaac Babel, who has been considered one of the great short-story writers. He ended up with a bullet in his head and an anonymous grave, his unpublished works lost. For years, his wife, believing him to be alive in the camps, would encounter released inmates bearing stories about Isaac. It was the state, brutally keeping hope alive, unwilling to admit its atrocity.
These people have no idea where terror even begins.
I recommnend Emma Gerstein's memoir called MOSCOW MEMORIES -- which includes the period of Mandelstam's initial arrest. Gerstein was very close to the Mandelstams and suggests that Osip tempted the authorities with a sort of naivete. His inflammatory poem, comparing Stalin's fingers to maggots, was after all an anomaly ... Also, DEATH OF A POET by Irma Kudrova covers the heartbreaking story of Tsvetaeva's last years. As tragic as Mandelstam's story is, Tsvetaeva's strikes me as even more horrible. I'm one of those who consider her as great a poet as Mandelstam.
If America was as bad as these blowhards claim, they wouldn't be pampered academic radicals, but rather bones in a Virginia forest.
Those who obstinately oppose the most widely-held opinions more often do so because of pride than lack of intelligence. They find the best places in the right set already taken, and they do not want back seats.
--la Rochefoucauld, Maxims, 1665
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