Justin carrying the cross at the National Cathedral
Friday
Every year at this time, Julia and I pause to remember our oldest child, who died in a freak drowning accident on April 30, 2000. Justin was 21 at the time and, feeling exuberant on a beautiful spring day, he flung himself into the St. Mary’s River—a place where he had swum as a child—only to be grabbed by a rogue current and swept away. Life moved on, as life does, and our other two sons have given us five grandchildren between them, so we have much to be thankful for. Still, the wound of loss never entirely heals. Nor do I want it to since the pain somehow keeps him present.
Language can never do justice to the death of someone we love, but poetry comes closer than any other form of language to articulating our feelings, so as usual I share a poem. Today I turn to that luminous poet Jane Hirschfield, who captures both the way we acclimatize ourselves to a death and how it always remains poignant. After the poet makes her observation about the potency of life–a version of Dylan Thomas’s “And death shall have no dominion”–I love how she slips into an understated but oh so powerful parenthetical aside.
In that second ending, the distant comes close to where we can touch it again. The abstract yields to the personal.
Poem with Two Endings By Jane Hirschfield
Say ‘death’ and the whole room freezes – even the couches stop moving, even the lamps. Like a squirrel suddenly aware it is being looked at.
Say the word continuously, and things begin to go forward. Your life takes on the jerky texture of an old film strip.
Continue saying it, hold it moment after moment inside the mouth, it becomes another syllable. A shopping mall swirls around the corpse of a beetle.
Death is voracious, it swallows all the living. Life is voracious, it swallows all the dead. Neither is ever satisfied, neither is ever filled, each swallows and swallows the world.
The grip of life is as strong as the grip of death.
(but the vanished, the vanished beloved, o where?)
Ukrainian American poet Ilya Kaminsky has a moving essay in Oprah Daily on the necessity of poetry in tough times. In it, he tells the story of a friend who, while spending whole nights in Kyiv subway stations serving as bomb shelters, has taken to
reciting poems to herself and those around her to keep sane. When she grows tired, she starts translating those poems into other languages, just as a way of keeping going.
Her story prompts Kaminsky to observe,
Critics in the West often ask whether poetry matters. I now realize that the only valid response to this question is: Do such critics matter? If a person sheltering deep underground as her city is bombed recites poems as a survival tool—to soothe herself and others—that is all the evidence I need that poetry matters.
And then he adds,
But we humans always knew that.
Yes, we always have known that. It’s just that sometimes we need reminding. I, of course, seek to remind you daily of this. But my reminders don’t have the fierce urgency that Kaminsky has as he reports experiences of poet friends still in Ukraine.
For instance, there’s his friend from Kharkiv, Anastasia Afanasieva, who “took a long break from poetry” to set up a successful business selling fishhooks but, with Russian bombs now having destroyed the business, she’s back to writing poetry again. Although in the past she won two of Russia’s top awards for poetry, Afanasieva has now shifted to Ukrainian. One poem, where she describes the decision, begins in Russian but shifts to her national language midway through.
Kaminsky quotes from her e-mail to him, which he observes reads at time like a prose poem:
Since the war started, I feel it’s like one long day: I still don’t know what day of the week it is or what date. The past was cancelled in one minute. Imagine a magic eraser, which erases all the text in one moment from the paper—and paper becomes white as a new snow. Personal past is no more. No former goals, no former job, no former habits, no former stores we used to visit for groceries every day, no former walking routes, no former landscapes, no home, no former dreams—pure nothing. You’re born again at the age of 40—having only a book of memories with you, a book, which you read till the end and there are no new chapters. And you, like a newborn, try to learn to walk and speak again.
“Poetry,” Kaminsky concludes,
now is as necessary as ever. Not because it is pretty or fancy. But because it helps us to articulate the most impossible moments: It gives us a gasp, a scrap of air in our lungs. When we have nothing else, we can still hold a handful of words in our memory, a tune, and that might be all we have got now to survive—we don’t know yet. But if we are lucky, it is there.
And then he leaves off with this advice:
Keep it safe, this verbal music. Memorize new line poems if you can. You might need them one day, war planes or not. When facing the blank wall that is crisis, everyone needs a bit of music, a tune, a balm.
During the German blitzkrieg of 1940 and 1941, London bookstores apparently sold out their poetry. If there are any bookstores left intact in Ukraine, I suspect they have as well.
Additional Afanasieva poem: I believe the following poem, translated from the Russian by Olga Livshin and Andrew Janco, was written after the Russian invasion of Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014. Reading it now, one thinks of those Ukrainian refugees who, having escaped to the west, are now returning home, in spite of the danger. As the poem notes, people sometimes hear a call that overrides all other considerations:
That’s my home. . .
1
That’s my home. There was a bridge here. Now there isn’t.
That’s my home. That’s my yard. It’s still here.
Where a bridge stood, there’s a river. No more bridge.
Where there was once a pass, now there’s a line.
We live here, on the line.
In the devil’s belly, that’s where.
2
I came back Barely made it Took a while to get everyone out I have a big family My parents are old Then there are my Brother my sister my pregnant daughter I got them all out Out of that damned house Just imagine There’s a river There was a bridge there Now it’s destroyed On the one side of the river these people On the other side, those Whoever they are Between them, our house It took me so many trips There and back For each person I barely got them out A big family These on the one side, those on the other The house stands like a shadow As though lead passes through the walls Or the house contorts its beams So that it can dodge the hail of bullets It twists left and right What it took me, a woman To get all of them out You can’t imagine One by one Right from the belly of the beast Coming back every time, Diving into all of that, Not knowing If there will be a way But I got them all out And now my daughter Yes, the pregnant one Says she wants to return She’s headed back tomorrow She has someone there A man she loves See, he stayed back there And love, well You know how love goes With those young people You know how it is for them Anything for love
Like much of the world, I’ve been thinking about those Ukrainians holed up in Mariupol, heroically resisting as Russia rains missiles down upon them. The Greeks resisting the Persian army at Thermopylae come to mind and, with them, A.E. Housman’s allusion to the battle.
Housman was a classicist as well as a poet, and details in “The Oracles” are drawn from Herodotus’s account of the famous battle. It took days of fighting before the large Persian army was able to overwhelm the smaller band. As Herodotus reports it, Xerxes imagined, somewhat like Putin, that the Greeks would simply retreat rather than stand and fight. After all, the numbers were all on his side. Here’s the famous Greek historian:
Hearing this Xerxes was not able to conjecture the truth about the matter, namely that they were preparing themselves to die and to deal death to the enemy so far as they might; but it seemed to him that they were acting in a manner merely ridiculous…
In Herodotus’s telling, an informant with inside information told Xerxes,
Hear then now also: these men have come to fight with us for the passage, and this is it that they are preparing to do; for they have a custom which is as follows: whenever they are about to put their lives in peril, they attend to the arrangement of their hair.
The Spartan king Leonidas, meanwhile, had been told an oracle that (again, according to Herodotus) either the Spartan capital of Lacedaemon would be “sacked by the children of Perseus” (the Persians) or he himself would die:
O ye men who dwell in the streets of broad Lacedaemon! Either your glorious town shall be sacked by the children of Perseus, Or, in exchange, must all through the whole Laconian country Mourn for the loss of a king, descendant of great Heracles.
When, after four days of waiting, Xerxes did not witness the expected Greek retreat, he attacked. Even then it took numerous assaults, three days of fighting, and a Greek betrayal before he finally broke through.
In Housman’s poem, two oracles are mentioned: the Oracle of Dodona and the Oracle of Delphi (“the midland navel-stone beside the singing fountain”). That the oracles of old are now mute doesn’t bother the speaker. After all, he’s not important enough to warrant an oracle, and besides he has his own oracle–“the heart within”—that tells him he’s going to die. Therefore he tells the oracle priestess, whom he impudently calls “my lass,” to can it. Combining a stoic fatalism with a dash of bravado, he tells her,
Oh priestess, what you cry is clear, and sound good sense I think it; But let the screaming echoes rest, and froth your mouth no more. ’Tis true there’s better booze than brine, but he that drowns must drink it; And oh, my lass, the news is news that men have heard before.
In the face of overwhelming odds and expecting the worst, the Spartans calmly sat down and combed their hair. The speaker imagines himself doing something similar in the face of his own imminent death.
The Oracles By. A.E. Housman
’Tis mute, the word they went to hear on high Dodona mountain When winds were in the oakenshaws and all the cauldrons tolled, And mute’s the midland navel-stone beside the singing fountain, And echoes list to silence now where gods told lies of old.
I took my question to the shrine that has not ceased from speaking, The heart within, that tells the truth and tells it twice as plain; And from the cave of oracles I hear the priestess shrieking That she and I should surely die and never live again.
Oh priestess, what you cry is clear, and sound good sense I think it; But let the screaming echoes rest, and froth your mouth no more. ’Tis true there’s better booze than brine, but he that drowns must drink it; And oh, my lass, the news is news that men have heard before.
The king with half the East at heel is marched from lands of morning; Their fighters drink the rivers up, their shafts benight the air. And he that stands must die for naught, and home there’s no returning. The Spartans on the sea-wet rock sat down and combed their hair.
I doubt that the Mariupol defenders are combing their hair, but they appear to be no less stoic. And like Leonidas and his followers, they are setting themselves up to become legendary in their turn.
The dispiriting news about school libraries forced to remove books continues, with the latest culprit being Walton County Schools in Florida. What strikes me about this particular list is the number of quality works found on it, including a Booker Prize winner, a Nobel Prize winner, and a National Book Award for Young People’s Literature winner. A number of these works I’ve actually read (which isn’t always the case) and so can personally vouch for.
First, though, I like the explanation offered up by New York Times columnist Charles Blow for the sudden spate of book bans and Critical Race Theory panic. Here he is on twitter:
During the summer of protests after the murder of George Floyd, millions of ppl – including incredible numbers of white kids – marched in defense of black lives. This shook the white conservative establishment to its core. In their minds their children had been indoctrinated.
All of the CRT panic, book banning and anti-protest laws are a direct response to this. They are trying to push white children’s exposure to – and sympathy for – racial issues back to the dark ages of Jim Crow ignorance. It is a simple as it is shocking.
Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize-winning Beloved is on the list. So is Arundhati Roy’s Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things. And Sherman Alexiewas a Young People’s Literature award winner for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Here’s the list of books removed from the Walton County School shelves:
–Mariko Tamaki, The One Summer –Judy Blume, Forever; –Christina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban; –Diana Gabaldon, Outlander; –Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things; –Alex Gino, George; –E. Lockhart, Real Live Boyfriends; –Ellen Hopkins, Tricks –Jennifer Mathieu, The Truth about Alice; –Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; –Charlaine Harris, Dead until Dark; — Tahereh Mafi, Unravel Me –Megan McCafferty, Sloppy Firsts; –Raina Telgemeier, Drama –Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury; –Toni Morrison, Beloved; –Angie Thomas, The Hate You Give; –Lois Duncan, Killing Mr. Griffin; –Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why; –Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes; –Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye; –Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian; –Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner Graphic Novel; –Brian Katcher, Almost Perfect
I’ve taught Morrison’s Bluest Eye and Beloved and Roy’s God of Small Things in various classes and led discussions of Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Hosseini’s The Kite Runner Graphic Novel in my book discussion group. No race, class or ethnicity is idealized or demonized in these books. Instead, we see characters caught up in systems that are beyond their control and who try, with the limited resources they have, to make do. Sometimes they survive, sometimes they are crushed, but their humanity invariably shines through.
For those who oppose the idea of multicultural democracy, all these works are a threat. By challenging us to empathize with people unlike ourselves—and showing the harm that comes from intolerance—they function as an implicit criticism of those who want to hide their children in a safe, antiseptic and White bubble. In Bluest Eye, we watch the disintegration of a little Black girl who wants to look like Shirley Temple and who is abused by the adults in her world. In Beloved, we watch the horrors of slavery at work, including how it pressures African Americans to commit horrors themselves. In God of Small Things, attempts to challenge the caste system—along with scars left over from colonial rule—destroy two children. In Kite Runner ethnic and class hatreds destroy a beautiful childhood friendship.
Claiming that they are acting to protect their children, rightwing parents cancel works that might prompt their kids to think differently than they do. And they’re not wrong. These works will indeed open minds to other worlds and other perspectives. But if you raise your kids to fear those worlds and those perspectives, you will turn them into frightened creatures like yourselves.
As Bigger Thomas’s defense attorney says of such people in Richard Wright’s Native Son,
They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their lives are being assaulted and outraged And they do not know why; they are powerless pawns in a blind play of social forces.
What they do not realize is that, through reading challenging literature, their children will learn how to negotiate the world, not live in fear of it. And as thinking beings, they will refuse to be pawns.
Today is the day that Australia and New Zealand remember their war dead, it being the anniversary of World War I’s Battle of Gallipoli. An expeditionary force made up of many Australians and New Zealanders landed at the Turkish Dardanelles on April 25, 1915, and the subsequent campaign would cost both sides a combined 250,000 casualties before the Turks emerged victorious. Just a few months ago we thought such carnage was behind us, only to see World War-style horrors return to the world stage.
Following another 1914 battle, this one where the Germans defeated the British at the Battle of the Mons, Laurence Binyon wrote “For the Fallen.” The fourth stanza is frequently quoted at occasions like Anzac Day:
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.
While I love that stanza, the rest of the poem has sometimes struck me as romanticizing death in battle, the way that Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” romanticizes it. (I express some of my reservations about such romanticizing here). I’ve always been more drawn to the poetry of Wilfred Owen, who exposes it. In his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est,” for instance, he refers to the poetic line of the Roman poet Horace—“Sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country”—only to call it a lie. If you could see a man dying of poison gas, he tells the reader,
you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.
The Ukrainians defending their homeland, however, has me thinking differently. Just because we acknowledge the horrors of war does not mean that we should close our eyes to combat heroism. “Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes,” says Galileo in Brecht’s play of that name, but when the times are indeed unhappy, we must honor those who step up. I find myself thinking of those brave souls defending Mariupol against impossible odds. When tyrants strike, brave acts are called for, and that’s what Binyon’s poem honors.
So here’s to all those who fall “in the cause of the free.” As Binyon puts it, “they are known as the stars are known to the Night,” and “to the end, to the end, they remain.”
For the Fallen By Laurence Binyon
With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children, England mourns for her dead across the sea. Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit, Fallen in the cause of the free.
Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres, There is music in the midst of desolation And a glory that shines upon our tears.
They went with songs to the battle, they were young, Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow. They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted; They fell with their faces to the foe.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.
They mingle not with their laughing comrades again; They sit no more at familiar tables of home; They have no lot in our labor of the day-time; They sleep beyond England’s foam.
But where our desires are and our hopes profound, Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight, To the innermost heart of their own land they are known As the stars are known to the Night;
As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust, Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain; As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness, To the end, to the end, they remain.
Added note: I just discovered that Rupert Brooke died on his way to Gallipoli, being felled by an infected mosquito bite on April 23, two days before the landing. His well-known poem “The Soldier” contributes to the romanticization that I have always been wary of. And yet, in the current situation, I can imagine it bringing solace to those Ukrainians battling the Russian invaders.
Goodall, The Ploughman and the Shepherdess: Time of the Evening Prayer (1897)
Spiritual Sunday
My dear friend Sue Schmidt alerted me to this poem by Naomi Shihab Nye, who is the daughter of a Palestinian Muslim father and an American Christian mother. “Different Ways to Pray” is a reminder that God is bigger than any of the rituals we devise to get in touch with the divine. When we confuse religious practice with God, we get into trouble. Sometimes, Nye reminds us, talking with God is like talking with goats and involves laughter:
Different Ways to Pray By Naomi Shihab Nye
There was the method of kneeling, a fine method, if you lived in a country where stones were smooth. The women dreamed wistfully of bleached courtyards, hidden corners where knee fit rock. Their prayers were weathered rib bones, small calcium words uttered in sequence, as if this shedding of syllables could somehow fuse them to the sky.
There were the men who had been shepherds so long they walked like sheep. Under the olive trees, they raised their arms— Hear us! We have pain on earth! We have so much pain there is no place to store it! But the olives bobbed peacefully in fragrant buckets of vinegar and thyme. At night the men ate heartily, flat bread and white cheese, and were happy in spite of the pain, because there was also happiness.
Some prized the pilgrimage, wrapping themselves in new white linen to ride buses across miles of vacant sand. When they arrived at Mecca they would circle the holy places, on foot, many times, they would bend to kiss the earth and return, their lean faces housing mystery.
While for certain cousins and grandmothers the pilgrimage occurred daily, lugging water from the spring or balancing the baskets of grapes. These were the ones present at births, humming quietly to perspiring mothers. The ones stitching intricate needlework into children’s dresses, forgetting how easily children soil clothes.
There were those who didn’t care about praying. The young ones. The ones who had been to America. They told the old ones, you are wasting your time. Time? — The old ones prayed for the young ones. They prayed for Allah to mend their brains, for the twig, the round moon, to speak suddenly in a commanding tone.
And occasionally there would be one who did none of this, the old man Fowzi, for example, Fowzi the fool, who beat everyone at dominoes, insisted he spoke with God as he spoke with goats, and was famous for his laugh.
There’s no better way to begin Earth Day than with a poem by Wendell Berry. In “Enriching the Earth,” the Kentucky poet meditates upon his different contributions to the cycle of life. The clover and grass seeds that he sows are destined to grow and die, just as the winter wheat is designed to be plowed back into the earth to enrich it. (“The cut worm forgives the plow,” William Blake tells us.) By stirring into the ground “the offal and the decay of the growth of past seasons,” the farmer has “mended the earth and made its yield increase.”
Berry himself is not exempt from this cycle. If, as a younger man, he actively aided the earth in the cycle, as he grows older he finds himself receiving more than giving. “When the will fails so do the hands,” he says, “and one lives at the expense of life.”
But that’s okay because he is preparing for a time when he will serve the earth in yet another way. He may be “slowly falling into the fund of things”—“all this serves the dark,” he writes— but rather than fearing this, he discovers that the thought of his body one day “entering the earth” only intensifies his engagement with nature. As he puts it,
And yet to serve the earth, not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness and a delight to the air, and my days do not wholly pass.
In other words, he lives fully in the moment as the air around him seems to expand.
And when the final moment comes—when the days do in fact pass—the aspect of ourselves that is “the heaviest and most mute” will enrich the earth in its own way. At this point, we will enter fully into the song of creation.
Enriching the Earth By Wendell Berry
To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds of winter grains and various legumes, their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth. I have stirred into the ground the offal and the decay of the growth of past seasons and so mended the earth and made its yield increase. All this serves the dark. Against the shadow of veiled possibility my workdays stand in a most asking light. I am slowly falling into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth, not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness and a delight to the air, and my days do not wholly pass. It is the mind’s service, for when the will fails so do the hands and one lives at the expense of life. After death, willing or not, the body serves, entering the earth. And so what was heaviest and most mute is at last raised up into song.
Yesterday’s post on Russia’s refusal to acknowledge Ukraine as its own country discussed poetry’s role in nation formation. In a lengthy twitter thread, scholar Kamil Galeev alerted me to a poem by Joseph Brodsky, Soviet émigré and Nobel Prize winner, that expresses Russia’s refusal. The poem shows me the depth of Russian sentiment better than anything else I have seen.
In fact, Galeev’s twitter thread and Brodsky’s poem make me realize that we must attribute the invasion to Russia as well as to Putin. We in the west have wanted to believe that Putin was misleading his country about Ukraine as a security threat. If only Russians would realize there is no threat, we’ve been thinking, they would oppose the invasion. I now realize that Putin’s hostility to Ukrainian independence predates him and has a long history.
Brodsky wrote his poem in 1991, when the Soviet Union was breaking up and the former “soviet socialist republics” wanted to become their own nations. To capture the distress that Russia felt over “losing” Ukraine, Brodsky imagines Russia as a jilted lover venting his fury. Below I cover the general message and tenor of “On Ukrainian Independence,” but if you want a full annotation of the poem, you can go here.
The poem begins with a reference to a famous 1709 battle in which Russia defeated Sweden’s invasion of Ukraine. It’s a moment of Russia-Ukraine lovemaking that the speaker remembers fondly. If Ukraine now wants to break up, the desire must come from elsewhere: say, from anarchists with their green flag or nationalistic ex-patriates living in Canada. As a sign of their former affection, the poet playfully uses ethnic slurs in his exchange: “Khokhly” for Ukrainians, “Katsapy” for Russians. He dreams of the good times (embroidered Ukrainian towels, sunflowers) and acknowledges some Russian responsibility for the break-up: “We Katsapy have no right to charge them with treason./ With icons and vodka, for seventy years we’ve bungled,/ In our Ryazan we’ve lived like Tarzan in the jungle.” Which is to say, “Since the Russian Revolution, we Russians have lived in a primitive state (icons, vodka, uncultured backwater), so I can see why you might want to leave us.”
So, like a man putting on a brave face as his mistress drops him, he tries to wish her well:
Away with you, Khokhly, and may your journey be calm! Wear your zhupans [traditional garb], or uniforms, which is even better, Go to all four points of the compass and all the four letters.
Then the bitterness simmering beneath the surface comes pouring out, filled with World War II references. Go back to your primitive “huts,” he tells Ukraine, where you can expect to be gang-banged by “Krauts and Polacks.” After all, you no longer have me to protect you. It was nice, he says, “hanging together from the same gallows loop” (the reference here is to Nazi slaughter of Russians and Ukrainians together), but now the beetroot soup we used to share you can eat all by yourself. Oh, and “good riddance.”
His thoughts turn to the Dnieper River, which flows from Russia to and through Ukraine, and he imagines it flowing in reverse. This in turn causes him to imagine two trains passing. Ukraine is a bullet train, speeding into the future and “looking askance” as it nurses its “age-old grievance.” I’m not sure what spitting into the river signifies. Maybe a symbolic letting go?
Except that this lover can’t let go. The more he claims that he’s so over her, the less convincing he sounds:
Don’t speak ill of us. Your bread and wheat we don’t need, Nor your sky, may we all choke on sunflower seed. No need for bad blood or gestures of fury ham-fisted, Seems that our love is up, if it at all existed.
You’re not going to see me cry, he declares:
Oh, gardens and grasslands and steppes, dumplings filled with honey! We’ve had greater losses before, lost more people than money. We’ll get by somehow. And if you want teary eyes – Wait ‘til next time, guys, this provision no longer applies.
Finally, characterizing Ukrainians as murderous fascists, he unloads with one final revenge fantasy. When his ex is on her deathbed, he informs her, she’ll regret her decision. How so? She’ll remember lines from Pushkin, not from Ukraine’s national poet:
God rest ye merry Cossacks, hetmans, and gulag guards! But mark: when it’s your turn to be dragged to graveyards, You’ll whisper and wheeze, your deathbed mattress a-pushing, Not Shevchenko’s bullshit but poetry lines from Pushkin.
Here’s the poem in its entirety:
On Ukrainian Independence
Dear Charles XII, the Poltava battle [1] Has been fortunately lost. To quote Lenin’s burring rattle, “Time will show you Kuzka’s mother,” ruins along the waste, Bones of post-mortem bliss with a Ukrainian aftertaste.
It’s not the green flag, eaten by the isotope, It’s the yellow-and-blue flying over Konotop, Made out of canvas – must be a gift from Toronto– Alas, it bears no cross, but the Khokhly don’t want to.
Oh, rushnyks and roubles, sunflowers in summer season! We Katsapy have no right to charge them with treason. With icons and vodka, for seventy years we’ve bungled, In our Ryazan we’ve lived like Tarzan in the jungle.
We’ll tell them, filling the pause with a loud “your mom”: Away with you, Khokhly, and may your journey be calm! Wear your zhupans [traditional garb], or uniforms, which is even better, Go to all four points of the compass and all the four letters.
It’s over now. Now hurry back to your huts To be gang-banged by Krauts and Polacks right in your guts. It’s been fun hanging together from the same gallows loop, But when you’re alone, you can eat all that sweet beetroot soup.
Good riddance, Khokhly, it’s over for better or worse, I’ll go spit in the Dnieper, perhaps it’ll flow in reverse, Like a proud bullet train looking at us askance, Stuffed with leathery seats and ages-old grievance.
Don’t speak ill of us. Your bread and wheat we don’t need, Nor your sky, may we all choke on sunflower seed. No need for bad blood or gestures of fury ham-fisted, Seems that our love is up, if it at all existed.
Why should we plow our broken roots with our verbs? You were born out of earth, its podzolic soils and its herbs. Quit flexing your rights and laying all the blame on us, It is your bloody soil that has become your onus.
Oh, gardens and grasslands and steppes, varenyks filled with honey! We’ve had greater losses before, lost more people than money. We’ll get by somehow. And if you want teary eyes – Wait ‘til next time, guys, this provision no longer applies.
God rest ye merry Cossacks, hetmans, and gulag guards! But mark: when it’s your turn to be dragged to graveyards, You’ll whisper and wheeze, your deathbed mattress a-pushing, Not Shevchenko’s bullshit but poetry lines from Pushkin.
In his twitter commentary on the poem, Galeev writes that
Brodsky sends multiple messages to Ukrainians (called with slur “Khokhly”). He: 1. Tells Ukrainians to go fuck themselves 2. Predicts: “you, scum will be gangbanged by Poles and Germans” 3. Wonders if he should spit in Dnieper in order to make it flow backwards.
Noting that Brodsky called the poem “risky,” Galeev argues that it
correctly reflected attitude of much of Russian society towards Ukraine. After 2014 it became especially relevant and was repeatedly endorsed by the media and authorities like the Russian parliament newspaper.
While I think that Galeev is right about the depth of Russian anger, I think he misses Brodsky’s comic irony. After all, one doesn’t go to a jilted lover for an objective assessment of a breakup. The feelings expressed, especially imagining an unprotected Ukraine raped, are not politically correct, but when are broken-hearted lovers ever politically correct? What I see in the poem is deep grief over the break-up between Russia and Ukraine. They’ve had a long history together and now it’s over.
But in an ironic twist of unspeakable horror, Ukrainian women are indeed being gangbanged because of the separation—only the rapists are not Germans or Poles but Russians. It’s as though the jilted lover, after having vented his grief through revenge fantasies, has become a murderous stalker prepared to enact them in real life.
That Russian media has missed the irony and is quoting the poem to cheer on the stalker—well, that is what we’ve come to expect of the state-owned Russian media. Galeev believes that Russia’s fury over Ukraine is so unhinged that he expects it to resort to tactical nuclear weapons if it can’t hold on to her.
If Brodsky saw this poem as risky in 1991, he would see it even more so now. What his poem shows me is what Galeev has been saying: that the Russian sense of connection with Ukraine is profound and existential. Brodsky, as a former Russian, may well grieve the separation and I imagine that he thinks Ukraine has made a mistake. After all, it has traded Pushkin for Shevchenko. But unlike Putin, Brodsky finds, in poetry, a healthy way to express his grief.
Kharkiv protects a statue of Ukrainian poet Shevchenko, who represents what Ukrainians are fighting for
Wednesday
Three weeks ago, drawing on a New Yorker article and my own knowledge of Russian literature, I speculated that Russia has invaded Ukraine in part for a sentimental attachment that can be found tin various Russian novels and poems. As it turns out, I didn’t know the half of it. Kamil Galeev, a fellow at the Wilson Center, explains that the issue goes much deeper, although poets are still at the heart of it. Galeev’s very long twitter thread identifies Russian poet Alexander Pushkin and Ukrainian Taras Shevchenko as the two main combatants in the struggle over Ukrainian identity.
It all has to do with language. Pushkin is considered the father of the Russian language and Shevchenko of the Ukrainian language. In “On Ukrainian Independence,” a horrifying poem in light of recent events, Joseph Brodsky reveals Russian views. In the eyes of this poet, who fled the Soviet Union and went on to win the Nobel Prize, Pushkin is a true poet, Shevchenko a bullshitter.
Reveling in the thought of Ukrainians (whom he describes as fascists) regretting their choice to leave Russia, Brodsky predicts that they will turn to the Russian poet, not the Ukrainian, when they’re on their deathbeds:
God rest ye merry Cossacks, hetmans, and gulag guards! But mark: when it’s your turn to be dragged to graveyards, You’ll whisper and wheeze, your deathbed mattress a-pushing, Not Shevchenko’s bullshit but poetry lines from Pushkin.
Galeev explains that Brodsky, like many Russians, believes that Ukrainians are actually Russians and that Ukraine is a farce. He observes,
What is interesting here is not so much the supposed superiority of Russians over Ukrainians. It’s the politicization of literature, specifically of poetry. Which poet you admire and quote is not neutral politics-wise. It’s the most important political question ever.
Galeev’s explanation is long and intricate but basically it comes down to the relationship between the Russian language and the Russian state. When Catherine the Great was attempting to homogenize all East Slavic Territories in the 18th century, the question arose as to which version of Russian it should impose. Before Pushkin, Russia didn’t have a single literary standard. After Pushkin, it did:
Pushkin created the modern Russian language in a sense that he created that version of Russian that would be later imposed by the authority of the state. That’s why he became the most impactful Russian author and why modern Russians can hardly read pre-Pushkin literature.
Having chosen Pushkin’s Russian to impose on Belarus and Ukraine, Russia could not tolerate a Ukrainian alternative. By showing that Ukrainian could also produce great literature, Shevchenko presented an existential threat.
Galeev sets forth the two men’s different views towards the Russian imperial tradition. First Pushkin, whose words are chilling:
Pushkin was super hawkish. During the Polish rebellion of 1830 he wrote: “We can only pity the Poles. We are too strong to hate them and this war will be the war of annihilation or at least it should be” “Poles should be strangled, our slowness is painful”
Pushkin celebrated the genocides of the Caucasian war: “I’ll sing about you, the hero, Oh Kotlyarevsky, the scourge of Caucasus ! Wherever you went like a storm Your advance like a black plague, Destroyed, exterminated the tribes”
Pushkin accepted Russian imperial identity as his own identity. He fully endorsed Russian imperialism and any criticism of it triggered him. Consider his poem “To the slanderers of Russia” against the French politicians who supported the Polish rebellion of 1830.”
According to Galeev, there are currently Russian movie stars who are reading Pushkin aloud as a justification for the current invasion.
Shevchenko, on the other hand, pushed back against Russia’s imperial ambitions:
While Pushkin celebrated Russian militarism, Shevchenko criticized it. He sympathized with the mountaineers fighting against the Russian conquest, lamented the losses of Russian conscripts. While human misery meant nothing to Pushkin, it was highly important for Shevchenko
In the two poets, Galeev writes, one finds very different visions of individualism. For Pushkin, fulfillment lies in subordinating yourself to the Russian state:
Consider how Pushkin advertised the benefits of the Russian rule:
Submit, Cherkes! Both West and East May soon share your fate; When the time comes, you’ll say arrogantly: Yes, I’m a slave but a slave of the Tsar of the World!”
Understandably, Shevchenko was not impressed:
No wonder Shevchenko mocked Pushkin so mercilessly. For a holder of Ukrainian cultural memes, Russian cultural memes looked absolutely disgusting, more like a zombie creed than as a human culture. For Shevchenko Russian empire was the evil to be destroyed
Galeev concludes that cultural uniformity is the real goal of the current war. “The problem with Ukraine,” he writes, “is that it exists.” This view is so deeply embedded in many Russians that they are willing to countenance the absolute destruction of the country to achieve that unity.
When the city of Kharkiv surrounds a thirty-foot statue of Shevchenko with sandbags, it is protecting more than just a statue.
