'The Dead Are Speaking'

On July 30, 1937, the NKVD issued Order No. 00447, signed by Stalin and NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov, which mandated the round-up of “ex-kulaks” and other “anti-Soviet elements,” including former officials of the Tsarist regime and former members of political parties other than the Communist Party. Local police officials competed to exceed the official quotas. This was the formal start of “The Great Terror,” as identified by Robert Conquest. By November 1938, roughly 1.3 million had been arrested, of whom at least 700,000 were executed. The rest were sent to the Gulag. What can be stated with reasonable confidence is that Stalin eventually murdered as many as 60 million people. 

The statistics leave one numb and uncomprehending. The recent vogue for socialism and like-minded tyrannies in the U.S. recalls an observation in the second volume of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir Hope Abandoned (trans. Max Hayward, 1974), one of the essential books of the last century: “No one should lightly dismiss our experience, as complacent foreigners do, cherishing the hope that within them—who are so clever and cultured—things will be different.” No human, she reminds us, is immune to the seductions of evil. The Russian poet Lev Ozerov (1914-96) writes in a 1962 poem translated by Robert Chandler:

 

“The dead are speaking. Without full stops.

Or commas. And almost without words.

From camps. From isolation cells.

From buildings as they blaze.

The dead are speaking. A letter. A will.

Diaries. Exercise books from school.

On rough pages of uneven brick—

the cursive of a hurrying hand.

With slivers of tin on a bed-board,

with shards of glass on a wall

or a thin stream of blood on a barrack floor,

life signed off as best it could.”

 

[Ozerov’s poem is collected in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (eds. Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski, 2015.]

'All That Is Human Slips Away'

Varlam Shalamov (1907-82), who ought to know, opens a poem with this line: “Memory has veiled / much evil . . .” Shalamov survived almost eighteen years in the Gulag, in the Arctic region known as Kolyma. His final imprisonment, from 1937 to 1951, was imposed after he referred to Nobel Laureate Ivan Bunin as “a classic Russian writer.” Don’t read his stories looking for inspirational tales of courage, perseverance and adversity overcome. He would laugh bitterly at such foolish naiveté. That he survived the Gulag, unlike at least 1.7 million others, may be impressive. That so physically and emotionally damaged a man could write so many stories, Chekhovian in their understated precision, is miraculous. Today, the seventy-second anniversary of Joseph Stalin’s death, is an appropriate time to read Shalamov’s poem, as translated by Robert Chandler: 

“Memory has veiled

        much evil;

her long lies leave nothing

        to believe.

 

“There may be no cities

        or green gardens;

only fields of ice

        and salty oceans.

 

“The world may be pure snow,

        a starry road;

just northern forest

        in the mind of God.”

 

The Anglophone world is finally catching up with Shalamov’s accomplishment. Now we have Donald Rayfield’s versions of his Kolyma Stories (2018) and Sketches of the Criminal World: Further Kolyma Stories (2020), which I reviewed here and here. Their combined 1,200 pages include 145 stories. An English-language website devoted to Shalamov and his work has posted a remarkable document, “What I Saw and Learned in the Kolyma Camps” (trans. Dmitry Subbotin and Robert Denis). The piece is dated 1961, ten years after his release from Kolyma. Here is the first of his forty-six hard-earned observations: “The extraordinary fragility of human nature, of civilization. A human being would turn into a beast after three weeks of hard work, cold, starvation and beatings.”

 

Shalamov lived his final years in the Soviet Union in poverty. He was blind, deaf and suffered from Huntington’s disease, but continued composing poems until his final months, when visitors took his dictation. He died in 1982 at age seventy-four. “Somewhat like Paul Celan and Primo Levi,” Chandler writes, “Shalamov seems in the end to have been defeated by the destructive forces he withstood so bravely and for so long. His own life story may be the most tragic of all the Kolyma tales.” Here is a poem by Shalamov from 1955, as translated by Chandler:

 

“All that is human slips away;

everything was mere husk.

All that is left, indivisible,

is birdsong and dusk.

 

“A sharp scent of warm mint,

the river’s far-off noise;

all equal, and equally light —

all my losses and joys.”

 

“Slowly, with its warm towel

the wind dries my face;

moths immolate themselves

in the campfire’s flames.”

 

[Chandler translates nineteen poems by Shalamov in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, edited by Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski.]

'Off to Welter and Waste'

The Russian-Jewish poet Boris Slutsky (1919-86) was thirty-three years old on the Night of the Murdered Poets, and he wasn’t among them. In the final stanza of his poem “About the Jews” (trans. G.S. Smith), dating from the 1950s, Slutsky writes: 

“From the war I came back safe

So as to be told to my face:

‘No Jews got killed, you know! None!

They all came back, every one!’”

 

So grimly ironic a poem is uttered with a straight face. No appeals to sentiment. A footnote informs us: “By 1987 (when it was published in Russia) this poem had become folklore, Slutsky’s authorship largely forgotten.” Just another Jew, more fortunate than the others.

 

The Night of the Murdered Poets took  place on August 12, 1952. Thirteen literary and intellectual figures were murdered on Stalin’s orders in the basement of Lubyanka Prison in Moscow. Four were poets who wrote in Yiddish – Perets Markish, Leyb Kvitko, Dovid Hofshteyn, and Itsik Feffer -- and a fifth, David Bergelson, was a Yiddish novelist. All were Jewish – “rootless cosmopolitans,” to use Stalin’s phrase. The others were intellectuals and scientists who had been active in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, organized during World War II by the Soviet government to mobilize world Jewish support for the Soviet war effort against Nazi Germany. All were arrested in 1948-49 and endured beatings and torture before their executions by firing squad.

 

Leyb Kvitko was best known as the author of books for children. These lines are from his poem “Memory" (trans. Harriet Murav and Zackary Sholem Berger):

 

Like my countless ancestors

In welter and waste

will my memory fade.

And should blossoming mornings arise

From this creeping time

Mornings that gladden people and beasts—

Tell them I’m gone

Off to welter and waste.

 

Nadezhda Mandelstam in Hope Abandoned (trans. Max Hayward, 1974), in a chapter titled “The Wandering Jew,” writes:

 

“A remarkable thing about the Jews is that, apart from suffering the lot of their own people, they also have to share the misfortunes of those in whose country they have put up their tents. Even a Jew who publicly renounces his Jewishness still goes to the gas chambers with the others, or is sent to Kolyma, like any member of the alien tribe whose language he speaks.”

 

On November 22, 1955, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR ruled there had been “no substance to the charges” against the defendants and closed the case.

 

[Smith’s translation of Slutsky’s poem can be found in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (eds. Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski, Penguin, 2015).]

'The Folly of Chance is the Logic of Fate'

On my first visit to his new apartment in Silver Springs, Md., my middle son, the family’s newly commissioned Marine, asked me to organize his bookshelves. The volumes fell into self-evident categories: Russian books in the original – Gogol’s Mjórtvyje dúshi – and in translation – War and Peace. Computer engineering, computer science, mathematics. History. Science fiction. Infinite Jest. Michael loaned me three books: 

Dissonant Voices in Soviet Literature (Harper Colophon Books, 1964), edited by Patricia Blake and Max Hayward. I first read this in the late Sixties. It was my introduction to Zamyatin, Shklovsky, Zoshchenko, Paustovsky and possibly Babel.

 

Grey Bees (Maclehose Press, 2020) by Andrey Kurkov, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk. In October, Michael met the novelist, who signed (in Russian) his copy on the title page. He was introduced to Kurkov by one of his Russian instructors at the Naval Academy, Catherine O’Neil.

 

Cardinal Points, Issue 11 (2021). This is a bilingual annual literary magazine published by the Slavic studies department of Brown University. Dralyuk serves as editor-in-chief and the other editors are Irinia Mashinski and Robert Chandler. I’ve been reading Cardinal Points online for several  years but this is the first time I have seen a hard copy. On the flight back to Houston I read a free-wheeling essay, “Lying to Ourselves” by Zsuzsa Hetényi, a professor of Russian at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. Hetényi is an academic but thoughtful and funny, a wonderful discovery. She was asked questions by a Hungarian literary magazine during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic:

 

“To me the powerful new wave of the literature of memory and life-writing suggests that we’re just putting our old world into a museum for a future that is both terrifying and unknown. Because there is something that’s just about to disappear forever. This is confirmed by  the fact that there is now a massive new wave of Holocaust remembrance, a burgeoning of Facebook groups focused on collecting old photos, retro objects and popular art of the very recent past.”

 

Hetényi is a Nabokov scholar who has translated two of his Russian novels, Mary and Glory, into Hungarian. In the essay she admires the marvelous digression about a pencil in Transparent Things. In the next paragraph she tucks an allusion to Lolita in parentheses: “Evil fate (McFate) has now ensured that everyone must follow a set of rituals. Now everyone practices separation.” She goes on:

 

“The concept of the author I most often cite, Vladimir Nabokov, that death is not a fading away but back into the cosmos and nature, is of little help these days, unless as faith-like self-deception. A great disadvantage of the current disease and of many other forms of death is that death is preceded not only by suffering, but also by the humiliating nature of Hungary’s horrendous hospital and social conditions. Probably this is much scarier and lasts longer than death itself. So this is not the ecstatic poetry of melding back into nature that Russian poets imagine. The sarcasm of Nabokov is far more useful. ‘The folly of chance is the logic of fate.’ Now, that is universal – if somewhat half-empty/half-full, both discouraging and encouraging.”

 

The quoted line is from Nabokov’s short story “A Busy Man” (1931; trans. 1976). Hetényi writes:

 

“Close to my way of thinking is what Nabokov calls cosmic synchronization. This has been over-inflated by philosophically inclined analysts. It means that one can embrace and feel simultaneously several events at several distant points in the world.”

 

Her final Nabokov reference is to one of his best Russian novels, Invitation to a Beheading (1938; trans. 1959). The protagonist, Cincinnatus C., is a prisoner : “[H]e is informed of his death sentence in a completely absurd, petty operetta dictatorship, and then he is merely left to shrivel in prison. But one of Cincinnatus’s selves survives solely because he begins to write in prison (quarantine) diary. The subject of the diary is himself, because ‘no one can take me away from myself.’ Loneliness is the fundamental form of human existence.”

'Mobile and Shimmering With Kinship'

“By the time of my birth, Stalin had been dead for 5 years 1 month and 4 days.”

 

Robert Chandler, the translator who gave us Vasily Grossman and Andrei Platonov, sent me a copy of The Naked World (MadHat Press, 2022) by Irina Mashinski. The book collects her poems translated or freely adapted from the Russian, and poems and short prose pieces written in English. Mashinski was born in Moscow in 1958, emigrated to the U.S. with her husband and daughter in 1991 and has published eleven collections of poems and essays in Russian. I know her as co-editor with Chandler and Boris Dralyuk of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (2015). With Chandler, Maria Bloshteyn and Dralyuk she translated Portraits Without Frames by Lev Ozerov.

 

The sentence quoted above is from “The Thaw,” the book’s opening piece. It suggests one of Mashinski’s themes: the unwelcome intersection of history and politics with private life. The title refers to the brief period in the Soviet Union following Nikita Krushchev’s secret speech to the 20^th Communist Party Congress in 1956. Krushchev denounced the cult of personality surrounding Stalin, and ushered in an easing of oppression and censorship that lasted into the mid-1960s. Mashinski writes:

 

“I was born in Moscow in the spring of 1958, the year of the impetus. It was during that year that [Yuli] Daniel and [Andrei] Sinyavsky [aka Abram Tertz] started publishing their work in the West, which eventually led to their show trial in 1965-66, which in turn inspired the dissident movement.”

 

In Mashinski’s poems and prose, history suffuses private life, often quietly, sometimes unpleasantly. Her parents met in 1957 during the Festival of Youth and Students, “when Moscow was, for the first time in decades, flooded with young people who smelled of soap and freedom and strolled and danced in the city’s freshly washed streets. My parents were part of this July whirlwind—and before I knew it, I appeared.”

 

She recounts the arrest and banishment of relatives – and the pleasures of a Soviet childhood with her family. She recalls a winter day spent skiing at the Architects’ Union resort in Sukhanovo with her father. While there she reads Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis and is “overcome by the pain and sorrow.” She writes:

 

“I didn’t know back then—and I doubt that even my father knew when we were skiing in Sukhanovo—that tens of thousands of people were shot in those same woods in 1930-50s including the 20,761 executed by the decision of the Troika [three NKVD officials], between August 1937 and October 1938—people whose names are known now.”

 

One of the finest pieces in The Naked World, “The Poet and the Child,” appears near the end of the book and, at least on the surface, makes no overt references to politics. It reads as a gentle, nonpoetic, apolitical poetic manifesto. Mashinski relaxes and luxuriates in her understanding of human nature – precisely what Soviet Communism sought to manipulate and ultimately destroy:

  

“It is rare that a grownup acts by association in everyday life—as rare as a slip of the tongue. How often do we shove a rake into the tableware drawer? For a child, however, a rake and a fork are, basically, one and the same. A child doesn’t deal in labels but in the substance of things. Such deep metonymy requires unconditional faith. And it is faith that breaks down first. This is precisely what happens in adolescence.”

 

Mashinski recalls a time “when the world was mobile and shimmering with kinship.” She strives to recapture this sense:

 

“This is why the poetic world, which lacks consistent correlations and is not regulated by the direct logic of concepts—this world of objectified meanings and all-permeating kinship—is off limits to those who’ve become irreversibly grownup, who have traveled too far upon the road at the beginning of which stands the symbol.”

 

Mashinski’s work has the charm of a gifted child, one undefeated by experience and the crushing weight of history.

'You Shall Recall Me Yet, and More Than Once'

On this date in 1972, Vladimir Nabokov wrote a poem in Russian about a Russian poet murdered fifty-one years earlier by the Bolsheviks. Here is the translation by his son Dmitri: 

“How I loved the poems of Gumilyov!

Reread them I cannot,

But traces have stayed in my mind,

Such as, on this think-through:

 

“`. . . And I will die not in a summerhouse

From gluttony and heat,

But with a heavenly butterfly in my net

On the summit of some wild hill.’”

 

With Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova, Nikolay Stepanovich Gumilyov (1886-1921) was Acmeism, a gathering of poets in the decade preceding the Revolution. They wrote in reaction to such Russian symbolists as Bely and Ivanov. Gumilyov and the others prized clarity and craft, and their work often is compared to the early Imagist poems of Ezra Pound. In his 1919 essay “The Morning of Acmeism,” Mandelstam defines the movement as “a yearning for world culture” and likens poetry to architecture: “Acmeism is for those who, inspired by the spirit of building, do not like cowards renounce their own gravity, but joyously accept it in order to arouse and exploit the powers architecturally sleeping within.”

 

Gumilyov was a hero of the Great War, Akhmatova’s first husband, a gifted poet and prolific translator (Villon, Blake, Wordsworth, Heine, Leopardi, Gautier, Baudelaire, et al.). Gumilyov never disguised his distaste for the thuggery of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and was arrested in August 1921 on trumped-up charges of conspiring against the Soviet  state. On August 26, as Guy Davenport puts it in “The Man without Contemporaries” (The Geography of the Imagination, 1981), Gumilyov “crumbled under the volleys of a Soviet firing squad, clutching a Bible and a Homer to his heart.” Sixty others died with him. His crime: membership in the nonexistent Tagantsev conspiracy, an entrapment scheme devised by Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka.

 

Nabokov’s brief poem remains largely opaque to me. In his biography of the novelist, Brian Boyd refers to Gumilyov as “a sort of crisper Kipling and one of the favorite poets of Nabokov’s youth.” So why, at age seventy-three, can Nabokov no longer read Gumilyov? Has he repudiated his youthful admiration or is the memory too painful? Seven months after Gumilyov’s death, Nabokov’s father was assassinated by right-wing thugs in Berlin. The second stanza seems to be lines from Gumilyov. Are they faithfully rendered or a half-recalled pastiche? The scene they depict – outdoors, butterfly net in hand – might have been conjured by Nabokov. Earlier that year he had finished writing his short, tricky novel Transparent Things, in which he writes:

 

“Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future.”

 

Boris Dralyuk has translated a 1917 poem by Gumilyov, a seemingly Nabokovian meditation on memory:

 

“You shall recall me yet, and more than once —

Recall my world, uncommon and exciting:

A clumsy world, fashioned of flame and songs,

But, unlike others, wholly undesigning.

 

“It could have been yours, too, but no. It had

Proven too little, or perhaps too vast.

My verse, it seems, must have been very bad,

My pleading with the Lord for you, unjust.

 

“But every time, drained of your strength, you’ll yield

And utter: ‘I don’t dare recall those nights.

A different world has fascinated me

With all its simple, unrefined delights.’”

 

The poem may be personal, even autobiographical. Gumilyov and Akhmatova divorced in 1918 after eight years of marriage. It may also address the future -- us, the readers -- as Nabokov does in his 1925 story "A Guide to Berlin."

[Nabokov’s poem can be found in Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings (2000), edited by Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle, a 782-page compendium of Nabokov’s work, scientific and artistic, on Lepidoptera, and a perfect bedside volume. The Mandelstam essay is in his Critical Prose and Letters (trans. Jane Gary Harris, Ardis, 1979). You’ll find Boris’ Gumilyov translation in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (2015), edited by Robert Chandler, Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski.]

'So Dark a Night Will Never See the Day'

“A poem is about many things and the literal sense is only one of them. The rhetorical and musical features of poetry are as intrinsic to a formal poem as its ostensible meaning, which may be little more than a coat hanger; the dazzling gown draped on that hanger may be made of quite other elements.”

Stephen Edgar could have modified “poem” with good or interesting. We’ve all read too many poems that amount to even less than what appears on the page. They are merely literal, like entries in a foreign-language phrase book. In fact, Edgar, an Australian poet, is introducing his translation from the Russian of a poem by Anna Akhmatova, “In Memoriam, July 19, 1914.” I have no Russian.  have read Akhmatova in various translations since the nineteen-seventies and feel as though her work still eludes me. As Edgar writes:

“Some poets have been served well by translation—Seferis and Holub come to mind—but others seem to lose a lot of their magic in the process, Akhmatova among them.”

Reading poetry in translation from a language one doesn’t know is an unavoidable act of faith – and doubt. Edgar’s right: I sense that I have an approximate understanding of Cavafy, Zbigniew Herbert, even some of Montale. In prose, the same is true of Tolstoy and Cervantes. But Pushkin, I suspect, will remain forever an exotic mystery. The case for Osip Mandelstam, in verse and prose, is stronger because I’ve been reading him and his wife for almost half a century, in many translations. Perhaps I’m mistaking hubris for understanding but the poems no longer feel utterly opaque. As an experiment, here is Peter Oram’s translation of Akhmatova’s “Voronezh,” dedicated to Mandelstam:

“All the town’s gripped in an icy fist.

Trees and walls and snow are set in glass.

I pick my timid way across the crystal.

Unsteadily the painted sledges pass.

Flocks of crows above St Peter’s, wheeling.

The dome amongst the poplars, green and pale in

subdued and dusty winter sunlight, and

echoes of ancient battles that come stealing

out across the proud, victorious land.

All of a sudden, overhead, the poplars

rattle, like glasses ringing in a toast,

as if a thousand guests were raising tumblers

to celebrate the marriage of their host.

“But in the exiled poet’s hideaway

the muse and terror fight their endless fight

throughout the night.

So dark a night will never see the day.”

I confess the poem seems flat and predictable to this reader. Perhaps this is because of what Edgar says about the “literal sense” of formal poems in translation. Voronezh is almost three hundred miles southeast of Moscow. The poem is dated 1936. From 1935 to 1937, Mandelstam was living in Voronezh with Nadezhda in internal exile. There he wrote the three Voronezh Notebooks. After returning to Moscow, Mandelstam was arrested a second time in May 1938 and sentenced to five years in the Gulag. He died in a Siberian transit camp in December 1938. A monument to him stands in Voronezh.

[Eight translations of Akhmatova's poems, including Oram’s, are collected in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (eds. Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski, Penguin, 2015).]

'Because I Cannot Hear a Human Voice'

In 1985, the year the Politburo elected Mikhail Gorbachev the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Clarence Brown edited The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader, a selection ranging from Tolstoy and Chekhov to Voinovich and Sokolov. In his introduction Brown writes:

“I now look back on this banquet of words with much pleasure, which I hope nothing will prevent your sharing. These writers, after all, continue in our time the tradition that has made Russian, along with English and classical Greek, one of the three supreme literatures of the world.”

That will provoke the French but even the resolutely monolingual and jingoistic among us will agree that no self-respecting reader can judge himself literate without a grounding in the Russian classics, beginning at least with Pushkin in the nineteenth century. We can hardly claim to know ourselves without them. For this gift we owe thanks to generations of translators, from Aylmer and Louise Maude and Constance Garnett to Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski. We live in an era of lively Russian translation. Prominent among its practitioners are Donald Rayfield (Varlam Shalamov) and Robert Chandler (Vasily Grossman, Andrey Platonov). In a conversation between them published in Cardinal Points Journal, Chandler admits he falls asleep during the uninspired reading of lectures, and adds:

“It is the same with books; if I cannot hear the intonations of a living voice, I quickly get bored. I find many translations of classic novels unreadable — not because they are especially clumsy, but simply because I cannot hear a human voice.”

The conversation followed Rayfield’s 2008 translation of Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842), which amounts to a chorus of human voices. For this reader, it has become the standard version and is available in paperback from New York Review Books. Take Rayfield’s rendering of the famous closing to Part One:

“Russia, where are you hurtling to? Give an answer! There is no answer. The bell peals with a wonderful ringing; the air, ripped to pieces, roars and becomes wind; everything that exists on earth flies past, and other nations and empires look askance and stand back to make way for the troika.”

    

Don’t mistake the tone of the passage for patriotic piety. The adventures of Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov are raucous and funny. Gogol’s imagination is wilder than any postmodernist's. He is no stolid realist or chronicler of downtrodden peasantry. In his “Author’s Note” to Up in the Old Hotel (1992), Joseph Mitchell turns the Russian writer’s name into an adjective meaning something like blackly humorous:

“It was the kind of humor that the old Dutch masters caught in those prints that show a miser locked in his room counting his money and Death is standing just outside the door. It was Old Testament humor, particularly the humor in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. Gogolian humor.”

Appropriately, Gogol was born on April 1 (Old Style) or March 20 (New Style), in 1809, though some sources give today’s date, March 31 (Old Style) or March 19 (New Style), as his true birthday.

[In his introduction to Dead Souls, Rayfield recommends Nabokov’s Nikolai Gogol (New Directions, 1944), the book that introduced the indispensable Russian word poshlust to the English-speaking world. Nabokov writes: “I can only place my hand on my heart and affirm that I have not imagined Gogol. He really wrote, he really lived."]

'O My Grand and Pitiful Age'

“In his free-and-easy way of dealing with historical figures, in the abrupt transitions and shifts of focus that show him to be quite unlike those awestruck devotees who turn the past into a sacred reliquary and life into the worship of things, there is the sense of measure we find in a son loving and respectful, yet natural and unconstrained in manner.”

A man in a Soviet prison camp writes of a poet who died thirty years earlier in a Soviet transit camp, a way station in the Gulag. Andrei Sinyavsky (Abram Tertz) writes of Osip Mandelstam in A Voice from the Chorus (trans. Max Hayward, 1976). How could a Russian poet (or, arguably, any of us who remain conscious) not dwell in history? Not in the textbook sense but history as the medium in which he moved, like fish in water. “Mandelstam lived in history,” Sinyavsky writes, “as he breathed the air around him: it was a given quantity, a gift, part of the order of things, which can no more be left than it can be entered.” Sinyavsky’s words are a warning to all of us, most especially those who would treat the present as an autonomous region without veins and nerves linking it to the past. In the most reductive sense, the present does not exist, though we must be prepared to deal with it. Mandelstam writes:

“I’ll say this in a whisper, in draft,

because it’s early yet:

we have to pay

with experience and sweat

to learn the sky’s free play.

“And under purgatory’s temporal sky

we easily forget:

the dome of heaven

is a home

to praise forever, wherever.”

In fact, it was not early. In less than two years, sick, maddened and starving, Mandelstam would die in a camp near Vladivostok.  The poem is dated March 9, 1937. The translator is Robert Chandler, and you’ll find it in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, edited by Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski. Some fifteen years earlier, Mandelstam already felt history closing in. This poem, also translated by Chandler, is “The Age”:

“Buds will swell just as in the past,

sprouts of green will spurt and rage,

but your backbone has been smashed,

O my grand and pitiful age.

And so, with a meaningless smile,

you glance back, cruel and weak,

like a beast once quick and agile,

at the prints of your own feet.”

Sinyavsky writes: “We usually think of history not as a living entity like ourselves, but as something fossilized and left behind, a matter for chronological tables and text-books. For Mandelstam history was real, and at once simple and complex like our own life – which was hence also historic in his eyes.”

`No, It's for Me to Thank You'

A book to look forward to this year: Portraits Without Frames by Lev Ozerov, to be published by NYRB Classics, with translations from the Russian by Maria Bloshteyn, Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski. Ozerov (1914-1996) was born Lev Adolfovich Goldberg in Kiev. Like Vasily Grossman, he served as a front-line journalist during the German invasion, and after the war published a long poem about the massacres at Babi Yar. In six months the Nazis shot at least 100,000 people, most of them Jews, in a ravine near Kiev.

Six of Ozerov’s poems, translated by Chandler, are included in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (2015). In his introduction to Ozerov, Chandler says Portraits Without Frames was published posthumously and “comprises fifty accounts, told in a variety of tones and with deceptive simplicity, of meetings with important figures, many – though not all – from the literary world.” Among the subjects are Boris Pasternak, Nikolai Zabolotsky, Isaac Babel, Shmuel Halkin and Varlam Shalamov. The poem about Shalamov (1907-1982), author of the brilliant Kolyma Tales, describes a man still “battered by Kolyma.” Ozerov meets with Shalamov in a café, and asks him to read his poems. Shalamov, who spent fourteen years in the Gulag, opens his knapsack:

“Inside it a wooden spoon

hobnobs with crusts of bread,

notebooks

and documents—

death, after all,

can creep up

on you any moment.”

On an American street, we might mistake Shalamov, one of the last century’s great writers, for one of the faceless, homeless mentally ill. Shalamov reads his poems and Ozerov thanks him. Shalamov replies:

“`No, it’s for me

to thank you. Who

nowadays asks anyone

to read poems?’ he says

hoarsely, with feeling.”

When they are finished in the café, Shalamov puts away his manuscript. “Out we both go / into the winter outside. / `It’s a cold day,’ I say. / `What do you mean?’ he says. / `It’s warm.’” Here is one of Shalamov’s poems, translated by Chandler:

“Snow keeps falling night and day.

Perhaps some god, now turned more strict,

is sweeping out from his domain

scraps of his old manuscripts.

“Sheaves of ballads, songs and odes,

whatever now seems bland or weak –

he sweeps them down from his high clouds,

caught up now by newer work.”

`But I Still Don't Know Where I Should Send It'

I’ve learned that Donald Rayfield, author of the best Chekhov biography in English, and of Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him (2004), and translator of Gogol’s Dead Souls, is now preparing a new translation of Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales. John Glad translated a selection of the 147 stories Shalamov wrote in samizdat between 1954 and 1973 as Kolyma Tales (1980) and Graphite (1981). In English we know him, as we know Solzhenitsyn, principally as a chronicler of the Gulag, where he spent fourteen years, but Shalamov is not a literal documentarian. He wrote fiction as artfully poised as Chekhov’s. In him, witness and artist maintain a rare balance. In his 1980 review of Kolyma Tales, Irving Howe writes:

“. . . the tension here between aesthetic and moral standards is good for our souls, if not our literary theories; let it remain, that tension, so that we will not rest too easily with mere opinion. But in the case of Varlam Shalamov it is also worth saying that one reason his work achieves high literary distinction is precisely the moral quality of his testimony. The act of representation yokes the two.”

From The Penguin Book of Russian Verse (2015), edited by Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski, I learned that Shalamov was also a poet. Chandler writes in his introduction that Shalamov’s stories are “a masterpiece of Russian prose and the greatest of all works of literature about the Gulag.” Shalamov’s poems are little read, he says, perhaps because “we tend to pigeonhole writers; it is hard to imagine that the author of the bleak and sober Kolyma Tales could also have written poems of such ecstatic joy.” Here is Chandler’s version of “Purple Honey”:

“From a frost-chilled

line of poetry

my anguish will drop

like a ripe berry.

“Rosehip juice will dye

fine crystals of snow –

and a stranger will smile

on his lonely way.

“Blending dirty sweat

with the purity of a tear,

he will carefully collect

the tinted crystals.

“He sucks tart sweetness,

this purple honey,

and his dried mouth

twists in happiness.”

Shalamov often writes about the impulse to write and its futility:

“I went out into the clear air

and raised my eyes to the heavens

to understand our stars

and their January brilliance.

“I found the key to the riddle;

I grasped the hieroglyphs’ secret;

I carried into our own tongue

the work of the star-poet.

“I recorded all this on a stump,

on frozen bark,

since I had no paper with me

in that January dark.”

In one of the Kolyma Tales, “Sententious,” the narrator says: “Little flesh was left on my bones, just enough for bitterness – the last human emotion; it was closer to the bone.” Shalamov’s poems, too, are stripped-down and elemental, and in this, presumably, they resemble life in the camps. As Chandler says, there is joy and even gratitude in the poems, but the more typical note is baffled stoicism:   

“And so I keep going;

death remains close;

I carry my life

in a blue envelope.

“The letter’s been ready

ever since autumn:

just one little word –

it couldn’t be shorter.

“But I still don’t know

where I should send it;

if I had the address,

my life might have ended.”

Shalamov lived his final years in poverty. He was blind, deaf and suffered from Huntington’s disease, but continued composing poems until his final months, when visitors took his dictation. He died in 1982 at age seventy-four. “Somewhat like Paul Celan and Primo Levi,” Chandler writes, “Shalamov seems in the end to have been defeated by the destructive forces he withstood so bravely and for so long. His own life story may be the most tragic of all the Kolyma tales.”

[Chandler writes about Shalamov’s poetry here and here.]

`Remember: Like a Puppy'

Peter Brook’s filmed adaptation of King Lear remains as painful to watch as it was forty-five years ago. As with the Civil War, thanks to Matthew Brady’s photographs, so is Shakespeare’s tragedy forever in black and white, thanks to Brook’s version. Cordelia’s death is nearly unwatchable. Her father says, “Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips, / Look there, look there!” and dies. Only a very cold fish is unmoved, and we share Dr. Johnson’s reaction:

“And, if my sensations could add any thing to the general suffrage, I might relate, that I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.”

Included in The Penguin Book of Russian Verse (2015), edited by Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski, is an untitled poem by Marina Boroditskaya (b. 1954), translated by Ruth Fainlight and addressed to Lear’s dead daughter:

“Cordelia, you are a fool! Would it have been

That hard to yield to the old man?

To say to him, `I, too, O darling Daddy,

Love you more than my life.’ Piece of cake!”

One of life’s diplomats is talking, the oh-so-logical sort who oozes reasonableness. But tragedy always trumps the soft-headed logic of appeasement. The speaker gives Cordelia a copy of the play and shows her the scene of Gloucester’s blinding: “Look what you've done, you stupid little fool! / OK, OK, don’t cry.” Followed by more advice:

“Like a puppy,

Pull him by the leg of his pants with your teeth

Into the game, into comedy! The laws

of the genre will lead us out to light . . .”

Who is the speaker? A critic? A “life coach”? We know the type. No need to turn the play into a comedy. The comedy, of the grimmest sort (see Beckett’s rewrite: Endgame), is already there. Had Cordelia followed the speaker’s advice and sucked up to her father, we’d have no King Lear. “Sorry I told you off. / Best regards to your father. Remember: like a puppy.”

[Go here for the Russian text of Boroditskaya’s poem and an alternate English translation.]

`One Wave in an Ocean of Millions'

Do young people still fall bookishly in love with Rossiya-Matushka, Mother Russia, and stay up too late reading Pushkin, Gogol and Tolstoy? Are they still smitten with Natasha Rostov or Prince Andrei? Saul Bellow wrote of his youth in Chicago with Isaac Rosenfeld: “We were so Russian, as adolescents, and perhaps we were practicing to be writers.” A writer I couldn’t read today on a bet, Dostoevsky, was my first crush, at age twelve. It had something to do with pervasive melancholy, an incipient spiritual light, the melodrama of everyday living and probably hormones. The Russians seemed to feel more than the people in my neighborhood. The affliction may be genetic. My middle son, who just turned sixteen, is teaching himself Russian, and War and Peace is calling to him. His closest friends at boarding school, his boxing partners, hail from Россия-Матушка.

I’m enjoying The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (2015), edited by Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski. Chandler has already translated Pushkin and Leskov for us, and one of the last century’s great novels, Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, but he reminds us in his introduction: “Almost all Russians see Pushkin, rather than Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, as their greatest writer. Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak and Tsvetaeva are loved at least as passionately as Bulgakov, Nabokov, Platonov, Sholokhov and Zoshchenko.” I hadn’t known that Varlam Shalamov, author of The Kolyma Tales (trans. John Glad, 1980), described by Chandler as “a masterpiece of Russian prose and the greatest of all works of literature about the Gulag,” was a poet before he wrote his stories. Here is “Baratynsky,” written in 1949 and named for Pushkin’s contemporary Yevgeny Abramovich Baratynsky:

“Three Robinson Crusoes

in an abandoned shack,

we found a real find –

a single, battered book.

“We three were friends

and we quickly agreed

to share out this treasure

as Solomon decreed.

“The foreword for cigarette-paper:

one friend was delighted

with a gift so unlikely

he feared he was dreaming.

“The second made playing cards

from the notes at the back.

May his play bring him pleasure,

every page bring him luck.

“As for my own cut –

those precious jottings,

the dreams of a poet

now long forgotten –

“it was all that I wanted.

How wisely we’d judged.

What a joy to set foot in

a forgotten hut.”

In a note, Chandler writes: “This poem records a real incident. Shalamov describes how playing cards were made from paper, saliva, urine, a little chewed bread and a tiny piece of crayon.” The final section of the anthology is inspired: “Four Poems by Non-Russians.” Most interesting and most pertinent to our literary love of Mother Russia is “Learning the Letter Щ” by Nancy Mattson, a Canadian-born poet who lives in London. Щ is the Cyrillic letter usually transliterated shcha. The sound resembles the English sh, but is prolonged: “It is basically a long, palatalized version of English’s `sh’ as in `ship.’” Mattson’s poem is a wash of Щ’s. See the final stanzas:

“I remember the shooshch

of my grandmother’s tongue and teeth

sucking her tea through a sugar cube

telling her stories in Finnish

“Hush now, it’s the one about her sister

in Soviet Russia, how she barely survived

on watery cabbage soup:   ЩИ

but was finally crushed     lost      she

“disappeared

the sound is a soft shchi

one wave in an ocean of millions

that receded but never returned”