--- wrobert at uci.edu wrote:
> It's true. The avant-garde really got a boost under
> Stalin.... robert wood
>
He was a teenager then. He grew out of it, like Rimbaud.
Montefiore writes on pp. 49-50 (pardon any typos):
Georgia regarded herself as an oppressed kingdom of knights and poets. The poems in Iveria, published undet Stalin's nickname "Soselo," were widely read and became minor Georgian classics, appearing in anthologies of the best Georgian poetry before anyone had ever heard of "Stalin." Deda Ena, a children's anthology of Georgian verse, produced between 1912 and the 1960s, included Stalin's first poem -- "Morning" in its 1916 edition. It remained in subsequent editions, sometimes ascribed to Stalin, sometimes not, up to the days of Brezhnev.
Dtalin's singing, now that he was an adolescent tenor, was said to be good enough for him to go professional. As a poet he showed a certain talent in another craft which might have provided an alternative to politics and bloodletting. "One might even find reasons not purely political for regretting Stalin's switch from poetry to revolution," believes Professor Donald Rayfield, who translated the poems into English. Their romantic imagery was derivative but their beauty lay in the delicacy and putity of rhythm and language.
The scans and rhymes of his poem "Morning" work perfectly, but it was his sensitive and precocious fusion on Persian, Byzantine and Georgian imagery that won plaudits. "No wonder," reflects Rayfield, "the doyen of Georgian letters and poliics, Ilya Chavchavadze, was willing to print this poem and at least four others."
Soselo's next poem, a crazed ode "To the Moon," reveals more of the poet. A violent tragically depressed outcast, in a world of glaciers and divine providence, is drawb to the sacred moonlight. In his third poem, Stalin explores the "contrast between niolence in man and nature and the gentleness of birds, music and singers."
The fourth is the most revealing. Stalin imagines a prophet not honoured in his own country, a wandering poet poisoned by his own people. Now seventeen, Stalin already envisions a "paranoiac" world where "great prophets could only expect conspiracy and murder." "If any of Stalin's poems "contained an avis au lecteur," writes Rayfield, "it is this one."
Dedicated to Georgia's beloved poet Prince Raphael Eristavi, Stalin's fifth poem was, with "Morning," his most admired. It was this that inspired Stalin's State Bank "inside man" to give him the tip-off for the Yerevan Square bank robbery and it was good enough to be included in Prince Eristavi's jubilee volume in 1899. Its heroic sage requires both the harp and the sickle.
The last poem, "Old Ninika" (CD -- I translated this poem from a Russian translation from Georgian and it's in the archives), which appeared in the socialist weekly Kvali (Plough), affectionately describes an old hero who "dreams or tells his children's children of the past," perhaps a vision of an idealized Georgian like old Stalin himself who ended up siting on his Black Sea verandah regaling youngsters with his adventures.
Stalin's early verses explain his obsessional, destructive interest in literature as dictator as well as his reverence for -- and jealousy of -- brilliant poets such as Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak. The words and influence of this "Kremlin crag-dweller" and "peasant-slayer" on literature were, as Mandelstam wrote in his famously scabrous poem denouncing Stalin, "leaden," his "fat fingers... greasy as maggots." But, ironically, the swaggering brute rightfully notorious for his oafish philistinism concealed a classically educated man of letters with surprising knowledge. Stalin never ceased caring about poetry. Mandelstam was right when he said, "In Russia poetry is really valued, here they kill for it."
The ex-romantic poet despised and destroyed modernism but promoted his distorted version of romanticism, Socialist Realism. He knew Nekrasov and Pushkin by heart, read Goethe and Shakespeare in translation, and could recite Walt Whitman. He talked endlessly about the Georgian poets of his childhood, and he himself helped edit a Russian translation of Rustalevi's "Knight in the Panther Skin," delicately translating some of the couplets himself and asking modestly: "Will they do?"
____________________________________________________________________________________ Choose the right car based on your needs. Check out Yahoo! Autos new Car Finder tool. http://autos.yahoo.com/carfinder/