“‘Poetry is power’, he once said to Akhmatova in Voronezh, and she bowed her head on its slender neck. Banished, sick, penniless and hounded, they still would not give up their power. … M stubbornly maintained that if they killed people for poetry, then they must fear and respect it – in other words, that it too was a power in the land.”
That’s from Nadezdha Mandelstam’s book Hope Against Hope, and the ‘M’ she quotes is her husband, Osip. Voronezh is one of the towns to which they were exiled under Stalin’s regime.
Hand’s up class if you can identify with, or imagine, a land and a time when poetry was feared? Perhaps you lot from Myanmar, and you thin guys down the back from North Korea, okay, but for the rest of us – this is ancent history at its most bizarre.
Poetry feared? A political power in the land? Old Osip stated: “only in Russia is poetry respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?”
He was right and he ended his days in a camp. The poem that saw him dragged off the first time (btw, this is from wikipedia, I’ve never seen two identical; there were several versions and of course, it is translated from the Russian):
We live, but we do not feel the land beneath us,
Ten steps away and our words cannot be heard,
And when there are just enough people for half a dialogue,
Then they remember the Kremlin Highlander.
His fat fingers are slimy like slugs,
And his words are absolute, like grocers’ weights.
His cockroach whiskers are laughing,
And his boot tops shine.
And around him the rabble of narrow-necked chiefs -
He plays with the services of half-men.
Who warble, or miaow, or moan.
He alone pushes and prods.
Decree after decree he hammers them out like horseshoes,
In the groin, in the forehead, in the brows, or in the eye.
When he has an execution it’s a special treat,
And the Ossetian chest swells.
I spent a week reading Mandelstam’s poetry recently. His openings are particularly astonishing. The first few lines of each poem always left me slightly dizzy. Wish I could read the Russian.
I think of the bureaucrats poring over the stanzas for slanders. Turning the metaphors over in their mind to find the hidden subversion. And then their reports to superiors – the poem on one page, with the bureaucrats annotations in the margin. Recommendation: exile. Perhaps it went something like that.
Posted by zukointheworld 
