Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Zelensky’s heroic resistance have crystallized for the world what’s at stake in the clash between democrats and authoritarians. Authoritarianism has also split American Republicans. On the one hand, there are those who either support or tolerate a man who attempted to override the results of the election and overthrow the government. On the other, there are those who still believe in the Constitution—including one who recently quoted Virgil as he took his stand.
While fascists like Marjorie Taylor Green and Madison Cawthorn are particularly toxic, I also have no patience for Trump enablers like former attorney general William, who while now seeking to distance himself from Trump still says he would vote for his former boss, despite having seen his sedition up close. Seeing his equivocations cause me to admire that much more those Republicans, some of whom I have disagreed with vehemently for years, who put their country first. Even before Ukraine, they realized the extent to which the GOP was going down an authoritarian path. Among these are Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol.
The Virgil quoter is Kristol. Here’s a series of tweets he recently posted:
If Liz runs for the Republican nomination in 2024, I’ll donate. I’d vote for her in the [Virginia] primary if it could make a difference. But I’m doubtful that will be the case. I think it’s more likely that in 2024 I’ll be voting not for a Reagan Republican but for a Zelensky Democrat.
Who, you ask, is going to be that Zelensky Democrat? Hoc opus, hic labor est.
The Latin sentence is translated in a third tweet, along with the passage in which it appears:
“The gates of hell are open night and day; Smooth the descent, and easy is the way: But to return, and view the cheerful skies, In this the task and mighty labor lies.” – Virgil, Aeneid, Book 6, lines 126-129, trans. John Dryden
The words are delivered by the Cumaean Sibyl, who is the priestess who presides over the Apollonian oracle at Cumae. Aeneas, unsure whether to continue on with his mission, needs her guidance if he is to consult with his dead father in the underworld.
In other words, Kristol is slightly misusing the passage. Indeed, “underworld” is probably a better word than “hell.” However, I agree with Kristol’s point. It has been easier to give in to Trump than to stand up to him, just as it has been easier to give in to Putin, but in both cases, that has just put people on the glide path to hell. I realize how hard it is to reverse course and vote Democratic. That indeed is where the task and mighty labor lies.
Thank you, NeverTrump Republicans, for being willing to put in the work that will take us back to cheerful skies. When the threat is this dire, we must stand together—here in America, in Ukraine, and in all places where democracy is threatened. New alliances must be formed to save the republic.
Thanks to my wonderful friend and editor Rebecca Adams, my book project is approaching its final stages as I bring the manuscript into line with her suggestions. In the revision process, I’ve also been taking advantage of some related articles she’s sent me, including a very useful piece by David Withun, headmaster of Jacksonville Classical Academy, who contrasts W.E.B. Du Bois’s views of literature with those of Booker T. Washington.
I have a chapter on Du Bois in my book, but most of it is devoted to his essay pointing out how, for much of history, white authors and audiences have been blind to their racial biases. As this viewpoint does not sit well with many conservatives, they might be surprised to discover that Du Bois was also a strong defender of a classical education. Thanks to Withun’s article, I will amend my chapter to include this fact.
Withun points out that Du Bois’s disagreements with Washington anticipate our current conflict between pre-professional and liberal arts educations. Washington, he notes, believed that African Americans
should learn useful trades that were relevant in post-Civil War America. By achieving success in the booming late 19th-century U.S. economy — mastering a practical trade in the fields of agriculture or mechanics, for instance — Washington believed black Americans could earn the respect of their white countrymen. He wanted the school he founded, the Tuskegee Institute, to educate black Americans to be self-sufficient contributors to the existing society.
Du Bois, on the other hand, worried that such education “would create a permanent caste system in the United States, restraining the potential of black Americans and creating a two-tiered society.” To break out of this, Du Bois believed, African Americans needed progressive legislation, the right to vote, and access to a liberal arts education. Apparently he had a “great books” list that he thought all Americans should read that included works by Lucretius, Livy, Cicero, Dante, and Cervantes.
His disagreements with Washington have been famously and succinctly captured in a Dudley Randall poem, especially the following stanzas:
“It seems to me,” said Booker T., “It shows a mighty lot of cheek To study chemistry and Greek When Mister Charlie needs a hand To hoe the cotton on his land, And when Miss Ann looks for a cook, Why stick your nose inside a book?”
“I don’t agree,” said W.E.B., “If I should have the drive to seek Knowledge of chemistry or Greek, I’ll do it. Charles and Miss can look Another place for hand or cook. Some men rejoice in skill of hand, And some in cultivating land, But there are others who maintain The right to cultivate the brain.”
“Chemistry and Greek” are shorthand for a well-rounded education. Du Bois reveled in the fact that he did not feel racially excluded when he turned to the classics:
I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out of the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed Earth and the tracery of stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the veil.
Withum points out that, for Du Bois, “knowledge of the humanities and citizenship were fundamentally linked.” He saw the purpose of education as rising
above the “veil” culturally dividing the races so men could experience their shared intellectual history and have insight into each other’s lives. For him, the means to this education were the old, time-tested methods. Indeed, he and his colleagues provided such an education to the children of freedmen at Atlanta University.
And then there’s this juicy quote:
Nothing new, no-time saving devices — simply old time-glorified methods of delving for Truth, and searching out the hidden beauties of life, and learning the good living,” DuBois wrote. “The riddle of existence is the college curriculum that was laid before the Pharaohs, that was taught in the groves by Plato, that formed the trivium and quadrivium, and is today laid before the freedmen’s sons at Atlanta University.”
In a related item, Rebecca also sent me a video of two Black academics, Anika Prather and Angel Parham, whose forthcoming The Black Intellectual Tradition: Reading Freedom in Classical Literature is very much in the Du Bois spirit. Rather than dismiss classical lit as the product of dead white and western men, Prather and Parham discuss how African Americans saw themselves in many of the conversations about freedom, goodness, and truth. Black poets and thinkers took conversations initiated by Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine and others and applied them to their own situations—just as, in a similar act of appropriation, they used the Bible for their purposes
In other words, leftists shouldn’t sideline the great thinkers of the past since their ideas are an integral part of the striving for freedom. By the same token, conservatives should be open to how people of color have revitalized many of those ideas.
One of my favorite essayists, New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, has once more hit it out of the park with a piece applying the ideas of literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin to understand the effectiveness of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Gopnik focuses on the fact that, before president, Zelensky was
not merely an actor—à la Reagan and some others—he was a comic, a clown. He came to office, it seems, on a platform of little else except his clowning, particularly his role in a comedy series about the elevation of an ordinary bumbler to the Ukrainian Presidency. If he had a platform, we were assured when he ran for President, in 2019, it lay in mockery—particularly of his predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, who conveyed a hard-edged appearance of authority. Once, when called a clown, Zelensky did not argue, but posted a video on Instagram of his own face with a big red nose upon it. The refusal to act like a grownup infuriated Zelensky’s opponents as much as Groucho Marx infuriated his political opponents in Fredonia, in Duck Soup, with his unseriousness.
To understand Zelensky’s prowess as an effective communicator and as probably the right person to be leading Ukraine at this moment, Gopnik looks to the Russian theorist who “made his special study the intricate relation of ‘carnival’ (i.e., clowning) with power.”
Bakhtin seems even more appropriate in that he too was victimized by the Russian state: Stalin imprisoned him in the Gulag and he barely survived. In fact, we almost lost one of his critical masterpieces, which he wrote in Siberia, because he was using the pages for cigarette paper.
It is to Bakhtin that we owe the concept of literary carnival, which I invoke when I teach Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale” (told in response to the elevated and oh-so-proper “Knight’s Tale”), Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie. Gopnik explains that
a “carnival” is not only a European peasant festival but an event that gave birth to a whole new way of looking at the world, a world turned upside down. The ugly and ridiculous things that bodies do—copulate, defecate, get drunk, fart—are the special realm of healthy vulgar comedy, of “carnival,” and this comedy reminds us of the limits of power to explain and dominate existence. The Church and the courts can give orders, but they can’t make an order more enduring and permanent than the gloriously sordid order of the body
A key work for Bakhtin is Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, which revels in the anarchy of body. Here’s a sample, chosen at random, about Gargantua as a child:
Gargantua, from three years upwards unto five, was brought up and instructed in all convenient discipline by the commandment of his father; and spent that time like the other little children of the country, that is, in drinking, eating, and sleeping: in eating, sleeping, and drinking: and in sleeping, drinking, and eating. Still he wallowed and rolled up and down himself in the mire and dirt—he blurred and sullied his nose with filth—he blotted and smutched his face with any kind of scurvy stuff—he trod down his shoes in the heel—at the flies he did oftentimes yawn, and ran very heartily after the butterflies, the empire whereof belonged to his father. He pissed in his shoes, shit in his shirt, and wiped his nose on his sleeve—he did let his snot and snivel fall in his pottage, and dabbled, paddled, and slobbered everywhere—he would drink in his slipper, and ordinarily rub his belly against a pannier. He sharpened his teeth with a top, washed his hands with his broth, and combed his head with a bowl.
Gopnik notes that Bakhtin counterposed the world of carnival with the world of officialdom:
There were, Bakhtin wrote, two lives available in Rabelais’s time: “One that was the official life, monolithically serious and gloomy, subjugated to a strict hierarchical order, full of terror, dogmatism, reverence and piety; the other was the life of the carnival square, free and unrestricted, full of ambivalent laughter.” It was the genius of Rabelais to break apart this world order by raising it to literature, not only to make us laugh but to make us aware that the highest philosophy could be produced by the lowest comedy. Comedy is the peasant’s revenge on the king; laughter is man’s revenge on God.
Gopnik points out that, for Bakhtin, carnival challenged
the cult of personality and the bureaucratic, grinding evil of Stalinism. What he admired in Rabelais and labelled “grotesque realism” is the opposite of social realism, the enforced manner of civic virtue of the Stalin period.
Such comedy is not merely anarchic but actually restorative. Just as, in Shakespeare’s comedies, stultified society gives way to a new and generative new order, so Bakhtin saw Rabelaisian comedy working its magic in the author’s own world. And here’s where Gopnik makes the link to Zelenskyy:
[For Bakhtin,] clowns degrade order in order to make us imagine another world. The softness, absurdity, and the giggling help us see past brutal authority toward a freer life. Bakhtin shows us what fires the world’s admiration of Zelensky: that dignity is available to those who smile at degradation, and that courage and comedy have a transitive relationship. The one willing to degrade oneself knowingly, as a clown does, is the one afterward most able to act with dignity.
And then Gopnik tells a story about Zelensky reflecting upon Putin:
In interviews with the French philosopher and writer Bernard-Henri Lévy in 2019, Zelensky made it clear that he was quite aware of the interconnection between his place as a clown and his role as a leader. When Lévy asked him if he could make even Vladimir Putin laugh “just as he had made all Russians laugh,” Zelensky insisted that he could.
To this Zelenskyy added a caveat, however:
“This man does not see; he has eyes, but does not see; or, if he does look, it’s with an icy stare, devoid of all expression.”
To which Gopnik observes,
They are eerie words, since one of Bakhtin’s other great themes was, so to speak, the politics of gazing, how we emancipate ourselves from our own solipsism by trying to see life through the eyes of another—a thing no dictator or tyrant can achieve. “Laughter is a weapon that is fatal to men of marble,” Zelensky told Lévy, aphoristically.
I would add one other Bakhtin concept, which is that he loved the chaos of novels, especially those of an author such as Dickens. As Bakhtin saw it, the interplay of many voices that one finds in the genre captures the wonderful variety of the world.
Fascists are not fans of such variety, wanting a single theme (say, the Russian empire) that they can control. They love marble statues but not a society teaming with life and diversity. Gopnik concludes,
Comedy and democratic courage are the same thing seen at different moments, and what they have in common is the will to defy authority in the cause of humanity—to assert the desire of people, ridiculous and animal and imperfect as we are, to live as we choose.
Seen this way, Ukraine could not have done better for itself that elect a comic as president.
A Gogol reference recently showed up in Ukrainian war news so of course I jumped on it. It’s in connection with the secret service officials that Putin has had arrested. The reference appeared in a tweet by one Andrzej Koslowski, a Warsaw math professor who has been tracking developments. The FSB is Russia’s current iteration of the Soviet Union’s KGB:
As he always does, the phenomenal @christogrozev telephoned the FSB generals reported to have been placed under house arrest to see if they answer the phone. They didn’t pick up the receiver while others did. The arrests seem to be connected to literally billions that were spent by the FSB on recruiting […] in the Ukrainian government, military, security services, universities etc, to help with the coup that was meant to give Russia control of Ukraine. instead they bought “dead souls” and stole the money.
Dead Souls (1842) is about a conman (I’ve compared him to Trump here and here) who is buying dead serfs from Russian landowners. Apparently, landowners are taxed for the number of serfs they have working their land and, because the census is out of date, often they are taxed for people who are no longer alive. The scoundrel Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov figures that, once he buys a substantial number of these “dead souls,” he can take out an enormous loan against them and pocket the money.
If the Gogol reference is literal and Koslowski correct, then the people to whom FSB claimed to have paid to become Russian sympathizers were actually dead. While I don’t know if this is true, it’s consistent with other reports of Russian corruption we’ve heard—says, oligarchs siphoning off money from Russia’s military and other public trusts to purchase estates, yachts, foreign apartments, and other niceties.
In any events, the only Ukrainians cheering Russia’s advances would have to be dead souls since the live Ukrainians appears universally opposed.
All my thoughts these days keep returning to the horrors in Ukraine. Therefore, when I read today’s Gospel reading about Jesus foretelling his death in Jerusalem (Luke 13:31-35), I thought of Ukrainian cities becoming death traps for its civilian population. The passage also reminded me of a later passage in Luke that tells of Jesus weeping for the future of Jerusalem, whose death he also foresees. Finally, those tears led me to a Malcolm Guite sonnet that provides some comfort in these troubled times. You’ll see my thought process once you read the passages and poem.
The first Luke passage has certain Pharisees warning Jesus to flee and him replying, like Ukraine’s Jewish president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, that his place is in the capital city, regardless of the danger. Jesus becomes maternally tender as he thinks of his forthcoming death, and I love his sense of himself as a mother hen gathering her brood at a moment of danger:
Some Pharisees came and said to Jesus, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” He said to them, “Go and tell that fox for me, ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.’ Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.'”
The second passage has Jesus weeping over the future of the city. Rome, of course, would one day surround and destroy Jerusalem, just as the Russians are attempting to surround and subdue Kyiv:
As Jesus approached Jerusalem and saw the city, He wept over it and said, “If only you had known on this day what would bring you peace! But now it is hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you when your enemies will barricade you and surround you and hem you in on every side.”
Jesus’s tears catch Guite’s attention. Again we see a comparison of him to a careful mother calling her children. “Fatigued compassion” is something we will have to watch out for in our own case since Ukraine’s nightmares could “stalk the light of day” for months:
Jesus Wept By Malcolm Guite
Jesus comes near and he beholds the city And looks on us with tears in his eyes, And wells of mercy, streams of love and pity Flow from the fountain whence all things arise. He loved us into life and longs to gather And meet with his beloved face to face How often has he called, a careful mother, And wept for our refusals of his grace, Wept for a world that, weary with its weeping, Benumbed and stumbling, turns the other way, Fatigued compassion is already sleeping Whilst her worst nightmares stalk the light of day. But we might waken yet, and face those fears, If we could see ourselves through Jesus’ tears.
It’s been such a grim week that I feel the need to end it with some humor. I owe today’s subject to a couple of tweets referencing Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem Howl.
I’m not up on all of social media’s forms so I need a little help in deciphering the tweets. First, however, here are Howl’s famous opening lines, in which the poet announces that the best minds of his generation are poets, jazz musicians, drug addicts, homosexuals, and other outcasts, who stand in stark contrast with what the Beats saw as America’s mindless conformity.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angel headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull…
Jeet Heer and Molly Jong-Fast see today’s best minds as social media junkies fixated on the debates that whirl constantly on twitter, Instagram, ticktock, substack (independent media platforms), and other avenues of communication. As with so much of the internet, social media is both a boon and a curse. On the one hand, it allows kindred souls to connect with each other, debating ideas and sharing important information. But of course, it can also (like drugs) pull people into dark holes where they spend all their waking hours while losing any sense of reality. Heer and Jong-Fast are satirizing the latter, including themselves, in their Ginsberg allusion:
Heer wrote,
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by debate club, starving hysterical naked, cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, dragging themselves through my twitter feed at dawn looking for an angry fix,
“Angry fix” is sadly accurate since, if you want to remain perpetually angry, twitter is a good place to go. For her part, Jong-Fast riffs off of Heer’s tweet:
I saw the best minds of my generation engaged in the discourse, starving, hysterical naked, cowering in substacks, tweets, fleets, Instagram stories, ticktocks.
Yes, at times social media sounds like an endless howl.
I’ve been following the twitter feed of retired Major Mack Ryan, who has been closely covering the war in Ukraine, and he recently quoted from a John Steinbeck novel that I read in high school and that could well become relevant. The Moon Is Down is about Germany’s occupation of Norway during World War II, and if Russia in fact manages to conquer Ukraine—no sure thing—then it will face a comparable insurgency. In fact, the Russian conquerors would probably fare even worse than the Germans did since the Ukrainians are better armed and have more outside support.
I quote an extended passage to capture the hell individual Russian soldiers can expect:
Now it was that the conqueror was surrounded, the men of the battalion alone among silent enemies, and no man might relax his guard for even a moment. If he did, he disappeared, and some snowdrift received his body. If he went alone to a woman, he disappeared, and some snowdrift received his body. If he drank, he disappeared. The men of the battalion could sing only together, could dance only together, and dancing gradually stopped and the singing expressed a longing for home. Their talk was of friends and relatives who loved them and their longings were for warmth and love, because a man can be a soldier for only so many hours a day and for only so many months in a year, and then he wants to be a man again, wants girls and drinks and music and laughter and ease, and when these are cut off, they become irresistibly desirable.
And the men thought always of home. The men of the battalion came to detest the place they had conquered, and they were curt with the people and the people were curt with them, and gradually a little fear began to grow in the conquerors, a fear that it would never be over, that they could never relax and go home, a fear that one day they would crack and be hunted through the mountains like rabbits, for the conquered never relaxed their hatred. The patrols, seeing lights, hearing laughter, would be drawn as to a fire, and when they came near, the laughter stopped, the warmth went out, and the people were cold and obedient. And the soldiers, smelling warm food from the little restaurants, went in and ordered the warm food and found that it was oversalted or overpeppered.
Then the soldiers read the news from home and from the other conquered countries, and the news was always good, and for a while they believed it, and then after a while they did not believe it anymore. And every man carried in his heart the terror. “If home crumbled, they would not tell us, and then it would be too late. These people will not spare us. They will kill us all.” They remembered stories of their men retreating through Belgium and retreating out of Russia. And the more literate remembered the frantic, tragic retreat from Moscow, when every peasant’s pitchfork tasted blood and the snow was rotten with bodies.
And they knew when they cracked, or relaxed, or slept too long, it would be the same here, and their sleep was restless and their days were nervous. They asked questions their officers could not answer because they did not know. They were not told, either. They did not believe the reports from home, either.
Thus it came about that the conquerors grew afraid of the conquered and their nerves wore thin and they shot at shadows in the night. The cold, sullen silence was with them always.
By shelling civilian targets, the Russians are hoping to grind the Ukrainians down, but Steinbeck points out that fear works both ways and that those whose homes have been invaded have the long-run advantage. As Ryan observes after quoting this last paragraph, “The Russians must grow very afraid of Ukrainians.”
I had a sense of déjà vu while reading a recent Washington Post article about challenges currently being faced by the city zoo in Kyiv, Ukraine. That’s because I’ve read Haruki Murakami’s account of zoo animals under fire in Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
Apparently the Feldman Ecopark zoo is near a military installation and also directly in the path of the invading Russian army. Their facilities have already been damaged, and the zoo has reported some of the animals have been injured and some killed. The smaller animals are being placed in makeshift shelters, including a bird enclosure and an unfinished aquarium.
The larger animals, however, pose a special problem. Horace the African elephant is being given sedatives to deal with the shelling, but as the zoo director points out, the elephants and giraffes “have no space to hide or run. Once they’re out of the zoo, they have fewer options than any human. It’s going to be the streets with tanks.”
Murakami’s novel describes the final days of the Japanese occupation of Hsin-Ching, Manchuria. As he awaits his troops’ inevitable defeat at the hands of the advancing Soviet army—let’s just say “Russian army” to emphasize the Ukraine parallel—the Japanese lieutenant is told to kill all the animals in the zoo the Japanese have set up. He’s ordered to use poison but there’s not enough poison to kill a horse, much less the entire menagerie. We see him wrestling with what to do:
If possible, I’d rather not kill any animals, the lieutenant told himself, in all honesty. But the zoo was running out of things to feed them, and most of the animals (especially the big ones) were already suffering from chronic starvation. Things could only get worse—or at least they were not going to get any better. Shooting might even be easier for the animals themselves—a quick, clean death. And if starving animals were to escape to the city streets during intense fighting or air strikes, a disaster would be unavoidable.
Besides, if he doesn’t follow the order to kill the animals, he might face court martial. This despite doubts “whether there would even be any courts martial at this late stage of the war.” In the end, however, he decides that orders are orders: “So as long as the army continued to exist, its order had to be carried out.”
I won’t share the grisly passages of the animals being shot (wolves, lions, tigers, bears, leopards), just the soldiers’ reactions.
When the soldiers finally succeeded in extinguishing all signs of life in the bears, they were so exhausted they were ready to collapse on the spot….In the deep silence that followed the killing, several of the soldiers seemed to be trying to mask their sense of shame by spitting loudly on the ground. Spent shells were scattered about their feet like so many cigarette butts. The ears still rang with the crackling of their rifles.The young soldier who would be beaten to death by a Soviet soldier seventeen months later in a coal mine near Irkutsk took several deep breaths in succession, averting his gaze from the bears’ corpses. He was engaged in a fierce struggle to force back the nausea that had worked its way up to his throat.
As in the Kyiv zoo, the elephants pose a special problem. One thinks of George Orwell’s famous essay “Shooting an Elephant” in the following passage:
In the end, they did not kill the elephants. Once they actually confronted them, it became obvious that the beasts were simply too large, that the soldiers’ rifles looked like silly toys in their presence. The lieutenant thought it over for a while and decided to leave the elephants alone. Hearing this, the men breathed a sigh of relief. Strange as it may seem—or perhaps it does not seem so strange—they all had the same thought: it was so much easier to kill humans on the battlefield than animals in cages, even if, on the battlefield, one might end up being killed oneself.
The elephant problem is solved by the hungry Chinese workers, who kill the elephants for food. In fact, they’re disappointed that they haven’t been able to do the same with all the animals. Then, a few days later, the Soviets swarm in and either kill or capture all the Japanese.
Animals may seem incidental in a war that is killing untold numbers of civilians, but their plight further dramatizes how the innocent are always victimized by the insanity of war.
Ilya Kaminsky, the Ukrainian-American poet whose poem “We Lived Happily During the War” I shared last week tweeted four days ago that a friend in Kyev was translating Greek poet C.P. Cavafy’s poem “City,” even as the city was under bombardment. While the choice of the poem didn’t at first make sense to me, I put it in dialogue with an Adrienne Rich poem and now think I’ve figured out why the poet turned to it.
Cavafy’s poem touches on a choice that many Ukrainians are agonizing over at the moment: do I stay or do I leave? If “City” didn’t at first seem applicable to Ukraine’s current situation, however, it’s because the poem essentially makes the point that leaving for a better life will do you no good if you remain the same person. It’s a theme graphically explored by Milton in his Paradise Lost description of Satan that I wrote about yesterday:
…from the bottom stir The Hell within him, for within him Hell He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell One step no more than from himself can fly By change of place…
Here’s the poem, which has been translated by Edmund Keeley:
City
You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore, find another city better than this one. Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong and my heart lies buried like something dead How long can I let my mind moulder in this place? Wherever I turn, wherever I look, I see the black ruins of my life, here, where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”
You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore. This city will always pursue you. You’ll walk the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses. You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere: there’s no ship for you, there’s no road. Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.
While the poem is grim, I hear something else in it when I think of the Ukrainian translator turning to it. Perhaps the city being attacked and the people being attacked reminds him or her—let’s say her—just how precious she finds both city and life. Perhaps she considers staying because she is reconnecting with a heart that she realizes she has buried. The prospect of death can do that.
Comparing the poem with Rich’s makes clear how much one has a choice, even in the most adverse of circumstances. Here’s Rich’s poem:
Prospective Immigrants: Please Note
Either you will go through this door or you will not go through.
If you go through there is always the risk of remembering your name.
Things look at you doubly and you must look back and let them happen.
If you do not go through it is possible to live worthily
to maintain your attitudes to hold your position to die bravely
but much will blind you, much will evade you, at what cost who knows?
The door itself makes no promises.
It is only a door.
Unlike Cavafy’s poem, Rich’s deals specifically with people leaving the country under external duress. Somewhat like Robert Frost in “The Road Not Taken,” Rich notes that it’s not clear which decision is better: each has a cost. One might think that, if one’s life is threatened, the choice is automatic, but Rich notes that this is not so:
If you do not go through it is possible to live worthily
to maintain your attitudes to hold your position to die bravely
And in fact, I’ve seen interviews with Ukrainian women choosing to stay (fighting-age men do not have a choice). They may realize that, even in the face of death, they can live worthily, maintain their attitudes, hold their positions—and if they must die, die bravely. If, before the invasion, they felt they were wasting their lives, this threat to their independence has restored perspective. Recalling that freedom is worth fighting for and even dying for can help people rediscover a purpose to their lives.
Further note: Just yesterday Kaminsky tweeted again that a friend—perhaps the same one—was translating Seamus Heaney’s poem “Casualty,” which is about 13 Northern Irish Catholics who were shot in a 1972 protest march. Kaminsky wrote,
A friend in besieged city of Kyev is translating Seamus Heaney right now, while there are explosions outside: “It was a day of cold raw silence, wind-blown” And that is how it is this afternoon.
The entire stanza is only too relevant as it describes the coffins emerging from a church and of the mourners bonding “like brothers in a ring.” Here it is:
It was a day of cold Raw silence, wind-blown surplice and soutane: Rained-on, flower-laden Coffin after coffin Seemed to float from the door Of the packed cathedral Like blossoms on slow water. The common funeral Unrolled its swaddling band, Lapping, tightening Till we were braced and bound Like brothers in a ring.
