'Like a Hibernating Bear'

In his poem “Whenever,” Robert Conquest endorses Wyndham Lewis’ call for “a tongue that naked goes / Without more fuss than Dryden’s or Defoe’s.” He means blunt, cant-free, indifferent to moral fashion. The poem proceeds in the form of an indictment: 

“Our age requires . . . But first we should expound

What sort of age it is. Just look around!

 

“An age that thinks it knows, what’s known to none,

Just how societies and psyches run.

 

“An age of terrorists and absolutes:

One primes the missile and the other shoots.”

 

Conquest’s judgment is sweeping: “intellectuals talking balls,” “ideologies of virulence.” And of course: “An age of people who’re concerned, or care, / With schemes that lead to slaughter everywhere.” Virtue-signaling abettors to murder, casual reversion to barbarism. Now Conquest the historian of Soviet Communism takes over: “. . . Age that ignored the unavenged Ukraine.”

 

In 1986, Conquest published The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1986), documenting Stalin’s 1929-31 collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine and the resulting famine known as the Holodomor. Millions of peasants were starved to death, deported to labor camps and executed. Conquest says in a 2006 interview: “Ukraine, like every republic in the former Soviet Union, has many scars. Ukraine was maimed by communism as a culture, as an economy, as a nation. How do you get healthy again after something like that? How do you recover?”

 

Let’s interrupt with the voice of Boris Khersonsky, a poet, psychologist and psychiatrist working at the Odessa regional psychiatric hospital. On Sunday, Boris Dralyuk, an Odessa native, read poems by Khersonsky he has translated during an online gathering, Cultivating Voices Live Poetry, devoted to Ukrainian poetry:

 

“Our microdistrict is teeming with saints –

Most are holy fools or martyrs, some have done stints

In prison. Many are alkies or suffer from other complaints:

Whenever they give us their blessing their fingers leave prints.

 

“A shame that the Lord grants his mercy mostly to others;

That the view from the big house can never suit you;

That all of us end up in fetters, doing hard labor;

That our neighbors all hate us – that it’s probably mutual.”

 

Dralyuk appeared on another panel discussion later in the day devoted to Soviet Jewish literature and sponsored by the Wende Museum. The other guest was the Odessa-born poet Lev Mak, who was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974.

Dralyuk describes Mak as “an Odessan legend of underground Soviet verse (as well as a former Ukrainian weightlifting champ!), who has kept a low profile in LA for decades. His 'Hollywood' (my translation) is my Hollywood.” Boris refers to his first collection, My Hollywood and Other Poems (Paul Dry Books, 2022). Here is his translation of Mak’s “Hollywood” (1981):

 

“That holy grove, wherein the Gorgon Fame

a bandage covering here suppurating eyes,

lows shamefully, enticing mortals

to copulate with her.

The waxen idols

 of Madame Tussauds speak of the moment

when that bandage is torn off

and the insatiable beast’s fury

floods her intolerable pupils with white heat.”  

 

When the moderator asked Mak for his reaction to the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, the poet said, “I am 82. If I were even 10 years younger, I would go back there.” He mentioned a machine gun.

 

Now back to Conquest, his “Black Sea,” on the north coast of which sits Odessa:

 

“Lynx-lithe, a concentrate of light

Swoops, sudden, through the headland firs,

Claws slashing the soft lens of sight.

Even the thewed slope shakes and blurs.

 

“The sun’s outflanked the earlier shade

Of foliage with a horizontal

Blaze. Half-blind, we turn and wade

Through photon-seethe to our hotel

 

“But soon we’re over the effects

Of the harsh cosmos breaking through.

Fish from the bay, dry wine, sweet sex,

Then the veranda, when we view

 

“For now, a dimmer, different world

That wildness tamed; -- while over there

The ground beneath the trees lies curled

Up like a hibernating bear.”

See Boris’ post today, in which he writes: “In short, Lev [Mak] is a character — a character straight out of Babel — but he also writes verse no less moving, no less invigorating than [Eduard]  Bagritsky’s. And for the past few decades he’s made his home in Los Angeles, at a house so close to the beach that he can hear the waves lapping at the shore at night. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, LA is just Odessa on a different scale.”

[“Whenever” and “Black Sea” are found in Conquest’s Collected Poems (ed. Elizabeth Conquest, Waywiser Press, 2020.]