'Huge Without Grandeur'

In his poem “Monumental Is More than a Question of Scale,” Turner Cassity takes on the laughable kitsch of Soviet-era war monuments: 

“Magnificently sited, on the choicest real estate,

The Soviet war monuments weight Central Europe down:

Les Beaux-Arts bloated.”

 

Cassity published the poem in the January 1992 issue of Poetry, in the immediate wake of the Soviet collapse. Among its other offenses, communism has always been guilty of crimes against the aesthetic sense. Reading Cassity, I was reminded of the broken but steroidal statue of Lenin seen floating on a barge in Theo Angelopoulos’ 1995 film Ulysses’ Gaze. Size displaces other qualities. To paraphrase Marx, quantity becomes quality. Big is better. Cassity includes a passage that seems, after thirty years, especially relevant:

 

“USSR does better for itself. In Volgagrad,

Colossal, in a strictest sense, the sword-uplifting Rus

Defends and is the Motherland; and in Odessa, plain,

Remote, an obelisk of dark red granite claims a shore,

Commemorating who knows what. The possibilities,

The Ukraine being what it is, are numberless and grim.”

 

The Odessa obelisk is known as the Monument to the Unknown Sailor, erected in 1960 in memory of Soviet sailors killed defending the city against the Nazis. In design, it is less offensive than most Soviet military monuments. As Cassity suggests, the obelisk to an outsider might commemorate any of "numberless" crimes in Ukraine. Theodore Dalrymple recently visited Highgate Cemetery in London, the final resting place of Karl Marx, and viewed the philosopher’s tacky tomb:

 

“There is something totalitarian about Marx’s tomb (for which, of course, he can’t be blamed himself). The bust atop the tomb is inappropriately gigantic, suggesting that his thought brings out the grandiose in his admirers and followers, combined with bad taste and lack of aesthetic tact. A smaller bust would have done Marx more honor, but this is not a thought that incipient or frustrated totalitarians would entertain. No wonder that communist monuments were huge without grandeur.”

 

[Casssity’s poem is collected in The Destructive Element: New and Selected Poems (Ohio University Press, 1998).]