Judging by allusions and quotations in his speeches, Volodymyr Zelensky either has a good knowledge of literature himself, or his team does. Unlike Putin, he speaks in a cultured manner, beautifully clearly and expressively, with a literary turn.
In an appeal to the Russian nation before 24 February, Zelensky quoted from a 1961 poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko that has no title, but is known by its first line:
Do Russians want war?
Go and ask the stillness
over steppe and ploughed field,
ask the birches and poplars.
Go and ask the soldiers
who lie beneath those birches,
and their sons will tell you
whether Russians want war…
Yevtushenko’s poetry became very popular in Britain after the appearance of the above selection in 1962, vigorously translated by Peter Levi and Robin Milner-Gulland. The energy, love interest and note of rebellion perfectly suited 1960s English poetry. I bought the book when I was seventeen and two years later was reading Yevtushenko in Russian. Love lyrics such as ‘Deep Snow’, ‘My beloved will arrive at last’, or ‘When your face rose over my crumpled life’, had a fermentative effect on me at the time, as I’ve acknowledged in the Notes to stanza 6 of Making Icons.
By the mid-1970s, however, it was clear that Yevtushenko was not so much a rebel against the Soviet regime as a consummate compromiser with it. Thank God, he never wrote such chauvinist rant as Pushkin’s ‘To the Slanderers of Russia’ or Blok’s ‘Scythians’, but even his poem ‘Do Russians want war?’ wobbles on the issue. The suggestion in it that it was Russia alone who defeated Nazi Germany, and that Soviet soldiers fell ‘so that the people of the whole Earth/could dream in peace’, reminds me too much of the posters that Soviet propagandists put up in Berlin after the War captioned My khotim mira, which can mean both ‘We want peace’ and ‘We want the World’…
But I would never dismiss Yevtushenko as a poet or a person. He was prodigiously talented, in poetry, prose, film and self-performance. His was a big and perhaps tragically insecure personality. It seems to me that in his verse he consciously adapted the styles of Mayakovsky and Yesenin. Like Yesenin, he wrote a woefully sentimental poem about a dog. Here it is, in an affectionate translation-parody made by me when I was twenty-one:
TO MY DOG
My dog, his black nose pressed against the glass,
waits for the sound of feet along the path.
I run my hand through his coat,
like him am waiting for someone to appear.
Do you remember, dog, not so long ago
when a woman was living here?
But what after all was she to me?
A sister or a wife maybe,
at times a daughter, so it seemed,
whom I was bound to help somehow.
She’s far away… And you’re so subdued.
No other women will come here now.
My dear old dog, you’re not a bad codger,
but what a pity you don’t drink vodka!
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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
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George Calderon c.1901
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Captain of the 11
George Calderon, 1912
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
War and woof poetry
Judging by allusions and quotations in his speeches, Volodymyr Zelensky either has a good knowledge of literature himself, or his team does. Unlike Putin, he speaks in a cultured manner, beautifully clearly and expressively, with a literary turn.
In an appeal to the Russian nation before 24 February, Zelensky quoted from a 1961 poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko that has no title, but is known by its first line:
Do Russians want war?
Go and ask the stillness
over steppe and ploughed field,
ask the birches and poplars.
Go and ask the soldiers
who lie beneath those birches,
and their sons will tell you
whether Russians want war…
Yevtushenko’s poetry became very popular in Britain after the appearance of the above selection in 1962, vigorously translated by Peter Levi and Robin Milner-Gulland. The energy, love interest and note of rebellion perfectly suited 1960s English poetry. I bought the book when I was seventeen and two years later was reading Yevtushenko in Russian. Love lyrics such as ‘Deep Snow’, ‘My beloved will arrive at last’, or ‘When your face rose over my crumpled life’, had a fermentative effect on me at the time, as I’ve acknowledged in the Notes to stanza 6 of Making Icons.
By the mid-1970s, however, it was clear that Yevtushenko was not so much a rebel against the Soviet regime as a consummate compromiser with it. Thank God, he never wrote such chauvinist rant as Pushkin’s ‘To the Slanderers of Russia’ or Blok’s ‘Scythians’, but even his poem ‘Do Russians want war?’ wobbles on the issue. The suggestion in it that it was Russia alone who defeated Nazi Germany, and that Soviet soldiers fell ‘so that the people of the whole Earth/could dream in peace’, reminds me too much of the posters that Soviet propagandists put up in Berlin after the War captioned My khotim mira, which can mean both ‘We want peace’ and ‘We want the World’…
But I would never dismiss Yevtushenko as a poet or a person. He was prodigiously talented, in poetry, prose, film and self-performance. His was a big and perhaps tragically insecure personality. It seems to me that in his verse he consciously adapted the styles of Mayakovsky and Yesenin. Like Yesenin, he wrote a woefully sentimental poem about a dog. Here it is, in an affectionate translation-parody made by me when I was twenty-one:
TO MY DOG
My dog, his black nose pressed against the glass,
waits for the sound of feet along the path.
I run my hand through his coat,
like him am waiting for someone to appear.
Do you remember, dog, not so long ago
when a woman was living here?
But what after all was she to me?
A sister or a wife maybe,
at times a daughter, so it seemed,
whom I was bound to help somehow.
She’s far away… And you’re so subdued.
No other women will come here now.
My dear old dog, you’re not a bad codger,
but what a pity you don’t drink vodka!
ADVERTISEMENT
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
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