Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut – Mar 26, 2024

 

Slaughterhouse-Five  First Edition, First Printing 

One of the strange facets of the novel is that there is no vivid description of the central event, the Dresden fire-bombing carried out by American and British bombers on the nights of Feb 13-15, 1945 when hundreds of planes dropped thousands of tons of bombs and incendiary explosives that destroyed the city of Dresden, and killed tens of thousands of its inhabitants. 

Vonnegut perhaps found himself unequal to describing the horror directly that was visited on the city when he was there. They went down  two floors below the pavement into the big meat locker Schlachthöf-funf. Vonnegut said “It was cool there, with cadavers hanging all around. When we came up the city was gone.”

He continues:

“Every day we walked into the city and dug into basements and shelters to get the corpses out, as a sanitary measure. When we went into them, a typical shelter, an ordinary basement usually, looked like a streetcar full of people who’d simultaneously had heart failure. Just people sitting there in their chairs, all dead. A firestorm is an amazing thing. It doesn’t occur in nature. It’s fed by the tornadoes that occur in the midst of it and there isn’t a damned thing to breathe. We brought the dead out. They were loaded on wagons and taken to parks, large, open areas in the city which weren’t filled with rubble. The Germans got funeral pyres going, burning the bodies to keep them from stinking and from spreading disease.”

This is the view we do NOT get from the novel. Instead it is irony, satire, the gentle comedy of a soldier who has lost his marbles in the war, and hallucinates about aliens who have captured and taken him to their distant planet, and shown him how to do time travel, which allows him to go back and forth in an imagined fourth dimension. 

The trauma of Dresden is filtered through the PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) of an American enlisted soldier, Billy Pilgrim. There is absolutely nothing about the trauma of the civilians who were burnt alive in Dresden, while Billy Pilgrim and his cohorts were cooling off two floors below in the cellar of the meat locker.

Of course, there is a lot of humour which Vonnegut extracts from the crazy situations in which war puts people:

“Billy looked inside the latrine. The wailing was coming from in there. The place was crammed with Americans who had taken their pants down. The welcome feast had made them as sick as volcanoes. The buckets were full or had been kicked over. 

An American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his brains. 

Moments later he said, 'There they go, there they go.' He meant his brains.”

Some have called it an anti-war novel. Perhaps it is better to characterise it as a novel that shows how people who have to endure war come out of it twisted and shattered by its horrors, and will possibly lose the equanimity needed to live a normal life, even if they end up on the victorious side. It is doubtful that Vonnegut takes a negative view of WWII at all, seeing as he enlisted and joined the war on his own. Recall that WWII in the European theatre was seen as pitting the forces of good against the Nazi evil.

These two pics will suffice to capture what Dresden was for centuries, and what it became within two days in February 1945. 

Dresden before the allied fire-bombing

Dresden after the allied fire-bombing on Feb 13-15, 1945

Poetry Session, 26 February, 2024

Kuttippuram Bridge over the Bharatapuzha is in the Ponnani region of Malappuram in Kerala. It was inaugurated in 1953 and built at a cost of Rs 23 Lakhs.

When readers at KRG choose their poems they cast a wide net. On this occasion we had a Malayalam poet, Edasseri Govindan Nair, represented by a poem. Malayalam poems are usually sung or chanted as chollal, but here it was delivered as the English translation of a modern poem of hope and longing; hope for the future made possible by a new bridge to transform the countryside, and longing for the old days. Other Malayalam poets who have been recited at KRG are K. Satchidanandan, Balachandran Chullikad, O.N.V. Kurup, Sugatha Kumari, Balamani Amma (mother of the poet Kamala Das), Kumaran Asan, and Chemmanam Chacko.

When one of our readers, Kavita, chose the ever popular Maya Angelou, Joe raised the question of who has been the most recited poet at KRG – after William Shakespeare, of course. The answer is Keats (13), then Eliot (11) and numerous Romantic poets with 8 occurrences. But how is it that Rumi, the most widely published poet in modern times, scarcely finds mention in the pages of KRG’s blog? He wrote lines like this (translated by Farrukh Dhondy)

Tomorrow is a hope – the dreamer’s way

The Sufi lives the moment, rejoices in today!

Amal Ahmed Albaz, born 1994, Canadian performance poet of Egyptian descent

Benjamin Zephaniah was the first performance poet we heard recited at KRG, way back in 2011 by Amita Palat. The music and rhythm of speaking comes naturally to someone of Barbadian-Jamaican descent. Britain has had a bright new wave of performance poets, for example, Kae West. At the session we heard a Canadian poet of Egyptian origin lament the bombing of Gaza in rap rhythm. When she recited it in Dec 2023 the destruction had been going on for 3 months, killing close to 20,000 Palestinians (mostly women and children), reducing much of the enclave to rubble and making the people homeless, facing starvation.

T.S. Eliot portrait by Gerald Festus Kelly, 1962

T.S. Eliot, ever popular at KRG was represented by two short poems that did not require the usual annotation to lay bare obscure meanings. In the first poem the poet hears the noise of plates in a basement kitchen rattling somewhere as he gazes on the street from a window, and then

The brown waves of fog toss up to me
Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,

The second poem featured a fictional cousin of modern mores who smokes and dances all the fashionable dances. The poet holds up the censorious sight of Matthew and Waldo (that is, Matthew Arnold and Ralph Waldo Emerson) trained on Nancy Ellicott – not that she cares. The last line (‘The army of unalterable law.’) is taken from another poet, Meredith, but Eliot is contrasting his reference ironically with modern devil-may-care attitudes.

Mary Oliver, the Pulitzer prize-winning poet whose rapturous odes to nature and animal life brought her critical acclaim

Mary Oliver was another outstanding presence at the session when Saras chose two of her poems. We know her poems from three earlier occasions when she has been presented. She is also the marvellous author of a handbook of poetry, that lays bare the mechanics of how a poem is built, from meter and rhyme, to form and diction, being imbued with sound and sense. Mary Oliver employs wonderful examples, ancient and new, to illustrate her exposition. It will surprise no one that six of the ten poets chosen at this session were women.

Most prominent of these is The New Colossus, a Petrarchan sonnet (rhyming abba abba cdc dcd). The entire sonnet is engraved on a plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour and lines 10 and 11 are often quoted:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free


                                                                             

1903 bronze plaque engraved with ‘The New Colossus’ sonnet by Emma Lazarus is located in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty

These words are a tribute to the diversity of America, which has been under threat from the masses who seek to enter America from its southern border. The press of poor people entering from Mexico is no longer a welcome sight to Democrats or Republicans. The original Colossus of Rhodes was a towering statue of Helios the sun god, built in 280 BCE to commemorate the defence of Rhodes against the attack of Demetrius. The sonnet of Emma Lazarus contrasts this ancient colossus with the Statue of Liberty presented by France as a symbol of liberty illuminating the world (La Liberté éclairant le monde).

Mother of 1084 by Mahasweta Devi, Jan 30, 2024

Hajar Churashir Ma (Mother of 1084) front cover, 1974.

The central event of the novel Hajar Churashir Ma (Mother of 1084) is an atrocity in which a youthful group of friends is attacked and killed by a gang of partisans from an opposing group. They were working to liberate poor people from domination and impoverishment by the wealthy strata of society.
                                                                           

Mahasweta Devi, Mother of 1084, translated by Samik Bandyopadhyay, 1997.

Calcutta is the scene and the time is 1970 when followers of Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal, two left wing leaders of factions of the Communist Party of India led a struggle based on the Naxalbari Uprising of 1967 in North Bengal. That uprising was an armed revolt by tribals instigated by ideologues of the communist movement:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naxalbari_uprising

The Naxalbari Uprising of 1967 led to a splintered future among multiple factions.

Naxalism and Naxalites were terms in use at the time, and spread to some cities, where violence took the form of killing persons in power and snatching rifles from armed policemen deployed to quell the violence on streets. Joe used to live at the time in the area named as relatively calm in the novel (Park Street and Camac Street) but it was common to see policemen holding rifles chained to their waist lest Naxaals attack them and wrest the weapons from their hands.

Mahasweta Devi (1926 – 2016) was an eminent Indian writer and social activist. She is a prominent literary personality and best-selling Bengali author of short fiction and novels.

Mahasweta Devi may not have been violent herself, but her lifelong sympathies were with the tribals whom she worked to educate, uplift, and write about. Why she wrote this novella, at first a play, is no mystery. She wanted to depict the empty veneer of materialism that paraded as culture among educated upper-class urbanites, and contrast it with the idealism of those who revolted and led movements to bring justice to the poor. As she wrote:
“In the seventies, in the Naxalite movement, I saw exemplary integrity, selflessness, and the guts to die for a cause. I thought I saw history in the making, and decided that as a writer it would be my mission to document it. As a writer, I feel a commitment to my times, to mankind, and to myself. I did not consider the Naxalite movement an isolated happening.”

Nelson Mandela honours Mahasweta Devi with the Jnanpith Award in 1997.

The violence was not only by the government on the Naxal participants; it took place as bloody warfare between opposing groups of leftist partisans which Mahashweta Devi recounts:
“A bloody cycle of interminable assaults and counter-assaults, murders and vendetta, was initiated. The ranks of both the CPI(M) and CPI (M-L) dissipated their militancy in mutual fightings leading to the elimination of a large number of their activists, and leaving the field open to the police and the hoodlums. It was a senseless orgy of murders, misplaced fury, sadistic tortures, acted out with the vicious norms of the underworld, and dictated by the decadent and cunning values of the petit bourgeois leaders.”

In Mother of 1084 (published serially in a periodical in 1973, and later as a novella in 1974) Mahasweta re-enacts the senseless killings of the Naxalites. The author does it evoking the intense love of a mother (Sujata) for her son (Brati) whose motivations and struggles she does not understand. Much of the novel is given to the mother’s search for the secret life of her son with his comrades, including a lover (Nandini) who is tortured by the police to extract information about others in the movement. The third woman who suffers is the mother of Somu, a comrade of Brati, who is also killed in the internecine warfare; but she can wail her loss openly, in a way Sujata cannot.

The passage of time is referred to often in the pages of the novel by the women who bear the suffering of past grief, the unbearable grief of losing a beloved son, and the poignant loss of a comrade in arms at the flowering of his youth.

In the first simile on p.61 Time is likened to the flowing of a river, Grief is the bank of the river where sorrow accumulates. As the river flows, the alluvium carried by the river water is heaped on the accumulated grief on the bank, submerges it, and soon new shoots of hope grow to mitigate the sorrow.

In a second simile on p.77, Time is seen firstly as the compression of loss: the past is gone forever. Secondly time is seen (as above) through the same prism of flowing water carrying fresh alluvial soil to cover the mudbanks of grief heaped by the past. And that brings new hope.

In yet a third simile on p.79, Time is cast as an ‘arch fugitive, always on the run.’ It reminds one of the Latin maxim tempus fugit (time flies) which is shortened from Virgil's Georgics, where it appears as fugit inreparabile tempus: “it escapes, irretrievable time.” In the novel Sujata ‘would never be able to retrieve the moment when Brati in his blue shirt stood at the foot of the stairs.’ Will the two women, Sujata and Nandini, be always in search of lost time, like Swann in Proust’s novel Remembrance of Things Past?

Samik Bandyopadhyay, the translator, says he had the privilege of working with the author who contributed her own notes on the translation.

Humorous Poems – Dec 16, 2023

This year’s gathering for our annual year-end Humorous Poems session had many invitees, among them past readers Geeta Joseph; and Gopa Joseph with her husband Michael. We also had visitors – Joe and KumKum’s daughters, Michal and Rachel; and Rachel’s friend, Amy Cotter, who was visiting Kochi after attending COP28 in Dubai. Arundhaty’s kind neighbours, Ramesh Tharakan and his wife Rani, were also there to participate. Another neighbour, a Sri Lankan named Shirani, also came to enjoy.

People arrived in all sorts of costumes to give everyone a peek at literature lovers during playtime. At one end was the spooky garb of ghosts in white, at the other end the formal fashion of young college girls in olden days dressed in colourful half sarees. In between were those who dressed in pyjamas with unmatched legs and odd slippers as though in search of their missing half. We had queens – the Queen of Hearts and the Queen of the Nagas; odd guys dressed in keffiyehs (to commiserate with the devastated Palestinians) and dapper men dressed in dark suits wearing fedoras like gangsters.

The poems were bright, nonsensical  and witty ranging from the whimsical lines of Ogden Nash to the lyrics of a Cole Porter song from one of his shows, Kiss Me Kate, a 1948 show that had over 1,000 performances on Broadway. Of course, one could not miss Edward Lear represented at this session by The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo with its memorable opening lines:

On the Coast of Coromandel

   Where the early pumpkins blow,

      In the middle of the woods

   Lived the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.

Lewis Carroll could not be missed either; we had an unusually long poem of his called Phantasmagoria. And nobody had heard of Andrew Jefferson until we encountered his One-Eyed Love:

She’s charming and witty and jolly and jocular

Not what you’d expect from a girl who’s monocular.

Wit could also inform the minds of poets seven centuries ago as we learned from the Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym who tells a good one on himself, when he made an assignation with a bar-maid at an inn and came a cropper because other hostellers at the inn sent him packing from bed.

After the merry evening of poetry we had lively conversations among friends and a wonderful contributed dinner with Arundhaty playing the generous host at her house, a magnificent abode designed by her with her late husband, Reggie.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka – Nov 30, 2023

 

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida – first edition Aug 2022

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka, the second novel by its author, was published in Aug 2022. Its reputation was assured when it won the Booker Prize for 2022 a few months later. The novel is set in Sri Lanka in the 1980s. Maali Almeida, a photographer, though dead is still active in his after-life. His engrossing interest now is to find out how he died. Just one week (“seven moons”) is given him to complete his detective task. In the hybrid world created by the author, Maali Almeida may move freely between the realms of the real world and the limbo world after death. But if he does not discover the solution in seven moons, then even the chance of rebirth will elude him forever.

Photographer with Nikon camera

The secondary quest in which Maali Almeida engages is that of finding what happened to the stash of negatives of photographs taken with his Nikon camera when he acted as a photo-journalist working for number of news agencies. He also worked at times as a fixer who could arrange meetings between the warring parties of the civil war that raged and terrorised Sri Lanka till the end of 2009.  His pious hope had been that these photographs recording the barbarity of civil war would reveal its true ugliness and the crimes that were being committed by all the parties – not just by the Liberation Tigers of the Tamil Eelam (LTTE) headed by its notorious chief, Velupillai Prabhakaran. 

During the seven moons the reader is exposed to real-life characters, thinly disguised, often maintaining the same name as the actual commanders and politicians they represented. The reader begins to appreciate the selfish agendas of the numerous actors in the Sri Lankan civil war and why it was fated more or less, to end in the large-scale atrocities that were ultimately heaped on civilians who happened to be living in Eelam controlled areas in the North-east of the country.

Bloodbath on the beach 10th April 2009 in Sri Lanka

Strangely for a novel pretending to write historical fiction, Shehan Kaarunatilka nowhere lays bare that it was Chinese weapons that helped the Sri Lankan military’s  bloodbath. Thousands of trapped civilians died in 2009 as government forces decimated the Tamil Tiger guerrillas in a brutal military campaign, which resulted in the killing of twenty thousand civilians and a forced ethnic cleansing of Tamils while a mute UN Secretary General (Ban-ki-Moon) watched.

Sri Lankan Air Force JF-7 fighter jets

Chinese Jian-7 fighter-jets (a licensed production version of the Soviet MIG-21), anti-aircraft guns, JY-11 3D air surveillance radars and other supplied weapons played a key role in the Sri Lankan military successes against the Tamil Tigers. After a daring 2007 raid by the Tigers air wing wrecked 10 government military aircraft, Beijing was quick to supply six warplanes on long-term credit. Such weapon supplies, along with $1 billion in Chinese aid to the tottering Sri Lankan economy in 2008, helped tilt the military balance in favour of the government forces.

What is equally shameful is how the UN under the weak leadership of Ban Ki-moon enabled the Sri Lankan government’s ethic cleansing of the displaced Tamils and then refused to investigate the human rights violations. For the real history behind this you may read the paper by Matthew Russell Lee – Sri Lanka's ‘Bloodbath on the Beach’ Made the UN's Ban Ki-mute Moot.

In the end we learn who the killer of Maali Almeida was, and why he was killed, but the elusive question of where the explosive negatives have vanished and whether  they can be traced remains unanswered. The wandering spirit of Mail Almeida in the next world cannot rest.

Poetry Session – Oct 26, 2023

Elizabeth Bishop watercolour, gouche and ink – Tombstone for Sale

Poetry attracts the most diverse practitioners of the art as the selection from this month’s session indicates. From primates to feminists, people of all genders and sexual inclinations adopt poetry as their mode of contemplating the world, and if possible reforming it, according to their vision. Our collection this month is a sprightly representation of the manifold well-springs of poetry.

Coincidentally, all four nations comprising the United Kingdom were represented: Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Their voices could not have been more different, nor their preoccupations more varied. It was uisge beatha (whiskey) in Scotland, farting frogs in Ireland, tadpoles in Wales, and serving tea to friends in England. Even their language was distinct: from joyous singing and revelry in Scotland, to the dull monotone of England; the loving naturalist’s gaze on a precisely observed body of water on an Irish farm, to the textual metaphors of a Welshman obsessed with language.

UK Poets – Burns, Eliot, Heaney, Williams

At this session there were three winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature – the second woman ever to win it, Syzmborska; and Heaney whose birthright language was Gaelic; and of course, T.S. Eliot who won it in 1948 “for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry.” Syzmborska was initially allied to the Communist ideology but later renounced her earlier views and defended free speech. Heaney will be remembered for his magnificent translation of Beowulf, a classic of Olde English. Heaney renders into poetry – a throbbing action-packed tale of the hero Beowulf, summoned by Hrothgar, king of the Dames, to defeat the under-sea monster Grendel.  Joe read excerpts from it at a 2006 session of KRG (not on the Web).

Seamus Heaney – Beowulf cover

Five women and five men among the poets selected, speaks to an even gaze on the world of poetry. Our women readers are as likely to choose women poets as they are to incline to poets of the male order. In the past we have had sessions exclusively devoted to women poets, as a theme, but they seem to rise up even without pre-selection. 

Women Poets Collage: Barnes, Bishop, Szymborska, Doshi, Limon

The Good Earth by Pearl Buck – Sept 28, 2023

Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973)

Pearl Buck was born as Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker on June 26, 1892, in Hillsboro, West Virginia. She spent most of her young life until the age of forty in China as the daughter of Presbyterian Christian missionaries in Zhenjiang (Jiangsu province), then a small city lying at the junction of the Yangtze River and the Grand Canal.

She was fluent in Chinese and American and got her college education in a women’s college in West Virginia. She had begun to write essays and stories in magazines in the 1920s. The Good Earth was her second novel published in 1931; it became a best-seller in 1931-32, won the Pulitzer Prize, and the Howells Medal in 1935. 

The Good Earth, First Edition 1931, published by John Day

It was adapted as a major MGM film in 1937 featuring Paul Muni as Wang Lung the farmer, and Louise Rainer as O-lan, his wife. 

Wang Lung and O-lan working on the farm

Wang Lung, though born as a poor peasant barely making a living on a farm, has ambitions, derived from a fierce love of the land. Land, he thinks it the only asset that survives famines, bad times, and the depredations of the warlords. Through all the hardships he makes headway, finding in his wife the sort of helpmate who propels him forward while taking care of his domestic needs and their familial obligations to elders.

Indeed it is she who in a moment of luck carts away a bag of jewels and bullion secreted in a cache in the Great House of the local overlord and mistress, when their wastrel family fell on bad times. O-lan asks only to keep two pearls, handing over the bag to Wang Lung. He lets her keep it; O-lan, however, did not want to wear it ostentatiously, but keep it as a store of wealth against future adversity. Sadly, Wang Lung later plucks it away from her to present to his mistress, the beauty of the local whorehouse, Lotus.

Lotus and Wang Lung

Toward the end of the novel when Wang Lung finds himself alone, surrounded by quarrelling members of his family after his wife’s death, he sorely regrets that he had snatched away the small gift O-lan wanted to retain.

O-lan may be seen as the real story Pearl Buck wanted to tell: of women who were the true up-builders of the family and community, toiling without ceasing, barely acknowledged, rarely rewarded, and entirely subservient to men. Bearing children, caring for elders, and husbanding meagre farm resources so that the children would have a better life – this was the life of rural women. 

All this, of course, changed with the revolution. Women are no longer uneducated. Women are no longer tied to serial child-bearing. They do not even have to marry, if they do not want to, and increasingly in modern China it is hard for a man to get a woman to say Yes! But all this advance does not mean patriarchy has disappeared. As this article, Patriarchy in China, notes, men still dominate in the political sphere even today, although women have equal economic power. Foot binding has been eliminated totally and arranged marriages are extremely rare. 

Romantic Poetry Session — August 25, 2023

Poets for the session on Aug 25, 2023

In addition to the usual English suspects, Shelley and Keats, we had two American poets Whitman and Emerson, a French poet Victor Hugo, and a Polish poet, Adam Mickiewicz. 

Within the English Romantic poets there was the younger generation consisting of Shelley, Keats, and Byron, that rebelled against the the older generation, signified by Wordsworth and Coleridge. Not only was the lifestyle of the youthful poets freer, but they were uncompromising in their support for the French Revolution, and for greater freedom of speech and belief, which they hoped would usher in a freer Britain. Byron’s contempt for Southey, Wordsworth and Coleridge (the old guard) led to the creation of a freer and even more Romantic era of poetry.

Wordsworth and Coleridge were close collaborators in writing poetry and in developing theories about poetic values and how poetry arises, culminating in the Lyrical Ballads. That joint collection of poems, first published in 1798, is generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature. The 1800 edition had the famous Preface that set out the changes Wordsworth hoped to bring about by treating poetry not as elevated speech, but common speech enlivened “with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness” toward Nature. He gave his famous definition of Poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.”  

The Young Romantics – Keats, Shelley, and Byron

The younger generation knew each other’s work and generally had good opinions to share. Keats did not come from nobility as Shelley and Byron did, and did not have the benefit of University education that came as a birthright for the well-born. However he made up for it by reading everything he could get his hands on via his friend Cowden Clark. 

Shelley and Byron did collaborate during their famous 1816 sojourn in Switzerland. Poems like Julian and Maddalo by Shelley about two friends: Julian the idealist who is like Shelley, and Maddalo the aristocrat who resembles Byron.  That Swiss contact made by Lake Geneva where the Shelleys and Byron rented villas, had many other literary consequences. There Byron found the medieval Château de Chillon, which inspired his long poem, Prisoner of Chillon. Mary Shelley wrote her famous thriller, Frankenstein, Or, the Modern Prometheus. And Byron finished the third canto of his epic poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, in the villa Diodati.

Villa Diodati in Cologny, Switzerland by Lake Geneva where the Shelleys and Byron met in 1816

The modern poet Vijay Seshadri writes about how he was inspired by the grand old poet – Whitman. Seshadri says in an interview that he is amazed by the delicacy of Whitman’s technique, the more so because he is thought of historically, as “massive and powerful.” Seshadri says Whitman “has a control over the minutiae of poetry that is of the same order as Emily Dickinson’s. You can just marvel and marvel at the little effects, and the little changes.” But the greatest challenge in Whitman is “the visionary life and the prophetic experience” he brings. Can one rise to that?

Fathers and Children by Ivan Turgenev – July 21, 2023

 

Turgenev – Fathers and Sons, First Edition, 1867, English translation bay Eugene Schuyler

Fathers and Sons is a novel by Ivan Turgenev published in 1862. Its reputation in Russia and abroad remains stout as ever after it gained a following in continental Europe as the foremost Russian novel of the 19th century. It highlights the conflict between the established order and the younger, more radical generation in society. In a way it is a preview of the Bolshevik revolution to come. 

Statue of Turgenev, made by the sculptors Yan Neiman and Valentin Sveshnikov, using Turgenev's death mask when sculpting the writer's face

Bazarov, the central character of the novel, representing the younger generation, is represented as a ‘nihilist’, or a skeptic about any political causes and philosophical –isms that are advocated in society by their champions. However, though Bazarov sets himself up as a nihilist, he has humanist tendencies; for example, he puts his medical skills in the service of the peasants he freely associates with, though he is the son a small landowner himself. So too the brothers Kirsanov with whom he has arguments have long since freed their serfs; their liberal-minded egalitarian nature is evident.

Falling in love is treated in various ways. There is the simple seigneurial manner in which Nikolai Kirsanov takes to Fenechka; the romantic manner in which Arkady ultimately falls for Katya, sister of Odintsova; and finally the more intellectual, and at the same time refined attraction that emerges between Odintsova and Bazarov. Bazarov’s first reaction is: “What a magnificent body; shouldn't I like to see it on the dissecting-table.” But when his plan to possess her physically fails, he won’t fall for chivalrous sentiments. He has to admit finally the fact that he is in love with a real but unattainable woman.

The duel scene in Chapter 24 is set up on the flimsiest of excuses, that Bazarov who stole a kiss from Fenechka, the concubine-mistress of Nikolai, has been caught in the act by Pavel, Nikolai’s brother. Some see it as the dramatic high point of the novel, but it is in fact a comic absurdity. Whether Turgenev meant it thus is debatable, but our readers derived only general merriment from the scene.

Turgenev lived in Paris in the latter part of his life with his friends, Madame Pauline Viardot and her husband. Turgenev, it seems, had a passion for painting and was a discerning critic. 

Turgenev, Pauline Viardot, celebrated mezzo-soprano, and husband Louis, cultural entrepreneur and art dealer, critic

Poetry Session – June 16, 2023

 

Collage of Readers on Zoom

We had ten poets represented, five American, three British, and one each from Russia and Argentina. The only translated poems were those of Pasternak from  Russian, and Borges from Spanish.

The poem chosen by Thomo, Rhapsody on a Windy Night, is from the 1939 book of poems by T. S. Eliot, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. Its  presentation in modern times occurred when the book was turned into the 1981 musical Cats composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber. The most famous song in the musical was Memory, adapted from the Eliot poem with lyrics by the musical's director Trevor Nunn. Memory is sung primarily by the character Grizabella as a melancholic remembrance of her glamorous past, and as a plea for acceptance.

Elaine Page as Grizabella in the musical Cats

The enigmatic Jorge Luis Borges from Argentina is best known for his short stories in Ficciones and his essays on various subjects. Every reader will be transported by reading his short story The Library of Babel which begins:

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. In the center of each gallery is a ventilation shaft, bounded by a low railing. From any hexagon one can see the floors above and below-one after another, endlessly. 

But at this poetry session we tasted a poem of Borges in which he successively refines the concept of a tiger, having never seen one,  

conjuring in my poem

is a tiger made of symbols and of shadows

– and thus

creates a fiction, not a living creature,

not one of those who wander on the earth.

The Other Tiger

The venerable Robert Frost who doesn’t like walls was about this very task of mending one. Each spring they find gaps from fallen boulders in the low stone walls between their houses and attempt to repair the gaps:

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

Robert Frost and a wall

Apparently the adage ‘Good fences make good neighbors’ urges them on to complete a task, which is actually redundant to the aim of trespassing for there are no cows to wander across. Frost philosophically reminds the reader

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

Boris Pasternak, whose poems we’ve read before, reappeared when KumKum read a poem out of his famous novel, Doctor Zhivago. The poem is titled Parting and we are reminded of the line from our recent Shakespeare session when Juliet confides to her lover Romeo that 

… Parting is such sweet sorrow

That I shall say “Good night” till it be morrow.

But the occasion of Pasternak’s poem is the final parting, out of many in the novel, between Lara and Yury, the doctor, who also writes poems; he is left alone in the deserted house and muses –

In years of strife, in times which were

Unthinkable to live in,

Upon a wave of destiny

To him she had been driven,

…

And now, so suddenly, she'd left.

What power overrode them?

The last parting of Yuri and Lara in Doctor Zhivago