Max McGuinness on a surprising literary find
Historian Simon Sebag Montefiore had a startling article in Saturday's Guardian about Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's talents as a poet. Writing under the pseudonym 'Soselo' in his native Georgian, long before he got into revolutionary politics, Stalin penned what Montefiore describes as "minor Georgian classics". Examples of these were published in anthologies until the Seventies - usually without attribution in spite of Stalin's cult of personality. Montefiore quotes Professor Donald Rayfield: "One might even find reasons not purely political for regretting Stalin's switch from poetry to revolution."
It's always hard to judge translations of poetry but this stanza from Stalin's "To the Moon" isn't half bad:
"Gently smile at the earth
Stretched out beneath you;
Sing a lullaby to the glacier
Strung down from the heavens."
If one wanted to be clever about this, one could even talk about the mass murderer's engaging use of parataxis(co-ordination of clauses without conjunctions) and the pleasing symmetry between "Stretched" and "Strung".
Stalin's attitude to literature has often been summed up by his brutish declaration that writers are "engineers of the human soul" - recently referenced by the film, The Lives of Others, a superb depiction of the workings of the East German Secret Police, the Stasi. But Montefiore argued persuasively in his biography Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar that Stalin was the best read Russian ruler of all time who got through a book a day and whose personal library extended to 20,000 well-thumbed volumes.
Stalin admired Dostoevksy but banned his books lest they have a subversive influence on the masses.
He also kept some talented writers away from the Gulag including Boris Pasternak. Montefiore chillingly relays how Stalin once telephoned Pasternak and asked of poet Osip Mandelstam, who had just attacked Stalin in verse: "He's a genius, isn't he?"; Pasternak disagreed and Mandelstam's fate was sealed.
There's no point pretending that there is some trite lesson here about the complex nature of evil but I think this sort of thing is definitely worth knowing.
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