The Friday Poem: Wet Paint, by Boris Pasternak

As another week concludes, we end with a random poem. Famous poets, obscure poets, amateur poets, whatever poets--just a poem to cap off the week.

Like this one:


Wet Paint, by Boris Pasternak

'Look out! Wet paint.' My soul was blind,
I have to pay the price,
All marked with stains of calves and cheeks
And hands and lips and eyes.

I loved you more than luck or grief
Because with you in sight
The old and yellowed world became
As white as painters' white.

I swear my friend, my gloom-it will
One day still whiter gleam,
Than lampshades, than a bandaged brow,
Than a delirious dream.

Famous Writers Arrested: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Much like the Famous Writers Shirtless posts, here we'll occasionally dive into mugshots of the criminally-inclined writers who found themselves in the big house.

Mugshots? Yes, please.

Today:  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The 1970 Nobel Prize winner, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, found himself on the wrong side of Soviet authorities in 1945 after some of his private letters were found by the KGB to be critical of Joseph Stalin. How critical? Statements like calling Stalin "the boss" and "the master of the house." Those are potentially the most nuanced and subtle insults in the history of insults, but it was apparently inflammatory to the Soviets.

That sort of behavior got you eight years in the Soviet gulags. To say Solzhenitsyn went to the cooler is putting it mildly. Most prison camps were in remote and bitterly cold regions of the USSR.

As Solzhenitsyn's lack of enthusiasm shows in his prison photo above, it was not a weekend in the Bahamas, and he was not cut any slack. Solzhenitsyn served a full eight year prison sentence, worked and froze in various gulags, and saw his wife divorce him in order for her not to be marked as a traitor to the country. (They'd later remarry and divorce again after he was released. Admittedly, they should have quit while they were ahead.)

Solzhenitsyn was released in 1953 and had some success with releasing some works, including a 1960 novel based on his experiences in the gulags called One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The Soviet leader at the time, Nikita Khrushchev, encouraged its publication as a tool for de-Stalinzation of the country.

Alas, hard line leaders took over power from Khrushchev, and that hard line mentality led to Solzhenitsyn being expelled from the USSR in 1974 for his works being too critical of the nation. It would be two decades until he was allowed to visit his homeland again, after the Soviet Union crumbled.

In the end, the USSR wanted to break Solzhenitsyn, but Solzhenitsyn's critical works were a small part in breaking the USSR.

Joseph Stalin loved his son as much as he loved the Russian people--which is to say, not so much.

Joseph Stalin was a tyrant, a dictator, and a despot that led the USSR for thirty years, and his actions and behaviors caused millions of Russians to die in purges and in prison camps.

In other words, he was a sweetheart.

You can see that sweetheart behavior in the way Stalin wrote a letter to his then 17-year old son's school teacher in 1938. Vasily Stalin was thought to be a spoiled, bratty child, and apparently word traveled back to dad about his son's misdeeds at school. The teacher complained to the Soviet leader, and Joseph Stalin wrote back apologizing, all while showing as little affection as possible for his son:


"To teacher comrade Martyshin. I have received your letter about escapades of Vasily Stalin. Thank you for the letter. Replying with a great delay because of being overloaded with work. My apologies. Vasily is a spoiled young man of average abilities, little wildman, not always honest, likes to blackmail weak "teachers," not rarely an insolent fellow, with weak - or more accurately - unorganized willpower.


He was spoiled by various "god fathers" and "god mommies," who continually emphasize that he is "Stalin's son." I am glad that in your person there is at least one self-respecting teacher who treats Vasily as everyone else and demands that the insolent boy follows the school's policy. Vasily is spoiled by principals like the one you mentioned, washcloth-people, who have no place at school; and if insolent Vasily hasn't destroyed himself yet it is because our country still has teachers who don't give slack to the little young swell.


My advice: demand stricter from Vasily and don't be afraid of fake blackmail threats of "suicide" from the capricious child. You will have my support.
Unfortunately I don't have the opportunity to fuss with Vasily myself. But promise to grab him by the collar from time to time.


Cheers!"


Average abilities, weak, not honest, spoiled, and insolent?

Aww, dad really did love his son after all!

((((excessively long drum roll)))) The Nobel Prize for Literature goes to...

...Svetlana Alexievich!

A few days ago, I posted how the bookies and finer gambling establishments felt, and Alexievich was the odds-on favorite. That also means if you were a Nobel groupie and a gambler with a jones to bet on obscure Belarusian writers, you really had to wager a lot of money just to make any noticeable return on investment. But, hey, congratulations if you did! You can buy lunch.

As for Alexievich, she's something of an anomaly for a Nobel winner in literature. She's a woman, for one. Out of the 107 times the award as been presented, only 14 women have won.

Secondly, she's from Eastern Europe--a region that has been moderately underrepresented by the selection committee in the award's history. (Only three winners have come from Russia [when it was the Soviet Union {and if we count that Alexievich was born in the Soviet Union, we can bump that up to four}], and four winners from Poland. And then there's the matter of whether you consider Poland as Eastern Europe [I don't.]. After that...well, that's it! No one else.)

And, lastly, Alexievich largely won on her nonfiction writing that details the history of major Belarusian and Russian/Soviet events, like the Chernobyl disaster. While many winners of the Nobel have written memoirs and essays, only two other winners have ever won largely on the back of historical nonfiction: Winston Churchill (1953) and Theodor Mommsen (1902).

And let me tell you--everyone knows you would have made some serious bank betting on Mommsen in 1902.






Google and Wikipedia both describe Poland as an Eastern European country--and who am I to disagree with the Great Google Machine? But if you draw a line of longitude down from the western side of Poland, it cuts through Italy. The eastern half of Poland's longitude cuts through Greece. Does anyone consider Italy and Greece part of Eastern Europe?

I didn't think so.