The diary of a writer-publisher: 42

22 September 2026
So Putin’s party ‘A Single Russia’ has increased its control of the Duma from 70% to 78%. The announcement has a fine Goebbelsian brio to it. How convenient that, in Putin’s words, it is a ‘clear vote of support’ for his war! I don’t suppose we shall ever discover whether the count itself was fraudulent, but of course the whole exercise was fraudulent because opposition was banned from taking part. Polls and interviews on the street indicate that well over fifty percent of Russians want an end to the war (and to Putin?).

But none of this should surprise us. The head of the electoral commission that announced the result is Ella Pamfilova, who in 2023 told the world that Russia doesn’t ‘need’ western democracy, i.e. open, unrigged, real democracy. It was a statement reminiscent for me of George Calderon’s bitter comment from St Petersburg in 1896 that ‘Russia does not want a Parliament, free press and the rest of it’. However, the risible earlier terms used by the Putinists to describe their version of democracy — ‘sovereign [‘top down’] democracy’ and ‘managed democracy’ — seem now to have gone out of fashion and been replaced by Pamfilova’s argument that ‘western democracy produces minority government’. This claim can be insidiously seductive — even Calderon fell for the idea that a tsar ‘sits for minority as well as majority, and for the Country as well, consequently there is much to be said for the autocratic system’ — but the common factor in Russia is always ruthless despotism.

8 October

pale blue asters
that chill with each day
into whiteness

from the train
a corner of a graveyard —
seeing beehives

19 October
One’s powers of self-embarrassment know no end. Months back a friend had shown me a translation by his brother of Pasternak/Zhivago’s poem ‘Hamlet’. The translator is a very experienced Russianist whom I have never met. I’ve known the poem since about 1967, when as a student I thought it was great, so even at a glance I could tell this translation was first-class. (I tried to translate it myself in my twenties, but always failed with the rhymes.) Well, as one does, I let the new translation ‘rest’ before taking a second look at it. When I did, I also examined about twenty other versions on the Web (e.g.) and even concluded that this was the best, so I told the translator’s brother that I wanted to publish it on Calderonia, asked him for the translator’s address, and prepared to write.

At that point, I re-engaged with the original Russian poem and was horribly disappointed. The first two lines fail the visual imagination test, as no actor ‘walks onto the boards’ and then walks back to ‘lean against the door frame’. Similarly, how from the stage can he hear ‘distant echoes’ of ‘what will happen in the age I live in’? (These are all my literal renderings.) His self-identification with Christ, using Christ’s own words in the Garden of Gethsemane, is too immodest, presumptuous. It strikes me now as strained and phoney. The next two stanzas seem deliberately to confuse the personas of Zhivago (narrator), Hamlet, and Christ, leaving the statement ‘now a different drama is playing’ completely opaque. Different from Hamlet’s, Christ’s, or whose? The last, folk-proverb line — ‘To live life is no stroll across a field’ — is, as a Russian girl said to me back in 1969, ‘very weak’.

One has, of course, to remember that this poem was ostensibly composed by Zhivago. In 1948, whilst working on the novel, Pasternak wrote to my friend Mikhail Gromov that ‘when I write poems at the moment, I always write them into the notebook of this man, Iurii Zhivago’. The first, two-stanza draft of the poem actually began not with ‘The [audience] buzz subsides’ but ‘This is all me’. Which ‘me’, Pasternak or Zhivago? The poem is certainly read by people as though it were both, and my impression is that Pasternak wanted it to be read ‘aesopically’ as both, but you can’t actually be two people at once. The poem’s portentous trochaic message as the opening of chapter 17, ‘The Poems of Iurii Zhivago’, is more excusable from Zhivago, the hero of a novel, than from Boris Pasternak.

I so took agin this poem that I decided I couldn’t even publish a good translation of it on Calderonia and had to write to the translator saying so… A direly cringe-making U-turn! As an editor, I have never accepted a translation before and then rejected it because I’ve changed my mind about the original. Unforgivable? I stressed to the translator that I had not changed my mind about the translation, but it was jolly difficult explaining myself. Today, however, I received a marvellous letter from him in which he even says ‘I now think “Hamlet” looks a bit undistinguished in English (though I sweated blood over it)’ and ‘Englishing Pasternak is an unrewarding labour’. Now there’s modesty, maturity and magnanimity for you.

Boris Pasternak’s home at Peredelkino, 22 February 1970

30 October
Ian Rickson’s production of The Cherry Orchard, in a ‘new adaptation’ by Conor McPherson and starring Kristin Scott Thomas as Ranevskaia, is now running at the Harold Pinter Theatre in the West End and I am going to see it on 14 November with Laurence Brockliss, who also saw this summer’s RSC production by Tamara Harvey in a ‘new version’ by Laura Wade. Professor Brockliss, who has contributed so much to Calderonia over the years, has a lifetime’s practical experience of theatre and I am delighted to say that he has agreed to write, as the next post, a review comparing the two productions.

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.