Today Joseph Stalin is one of the most admired figures in contemporary Russia.  Go figure.

Sure he did bad things, but it was worth it, right? So the line of thinking goes. Paul Gregory, author of Women of the Gulag, talked about the matter in a recent talk at Hoover Institution, during its annual summer workshop, which draws international scholars to the world-famous archives (I’ve written about it here ). His new book “attempts to capture the sights, sounds, and smells of the Great Terror of 1937-38 through the eyes of five women caught up in extraordinary circumstances.” (I’ve written about the documentary that accompanies the film, by the Russian-American filmmaker Marianna Yarovskaya, here.)

“Stalin is purported to have said that the death of one person is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic.  Those of us who study Soviet Russia fall into this trap,” he said. “We think we can convince people of Stalin’s evil by citing the millions who died in his famines, the hundreds of thousands shot during the Great Terror of 1937-38, and the millions of men, women, and children who sat in his concentration camps and special settlements.”

Head of family at 11

With his book, Paul hopes to make statistics into individual stories.  Paul said that “overwhelmingly his victims were ordinary people, confused why they had been singled out. They tell us of the fine dividing line between perpetrator and victim.”  When Paul began looking, he knew that his chances of finding living survivors was slim – they would be women in their 80s or 90s – but he persevered.  “Lo and behold, we found three of our primary characters still living, ornery, and lucid, and in the locale in which their stories take place.  In other cases, we found their daughters, who were old enough to tell their family’s stories.” Ages ranged from 86 to 96.

His research assistant Natalia Reshetova tells the story of the search for one of them, “Fekla,” in the current issue of the Hoover Digest. Fekla’s family of “kulaks,” middle-class peasant farmers (we’ve written about that effort here), were targeted by Stalin’s “dekulakization” of the Soviet countryside.  She grew up to become a founding member of Memorial, the society to preserve the memory of these terrible times. An excerpt from the article:

Executed

She found herself in the fall of 1931, just short of five years old, in a cold earthen dugout that was part of the vast Gulag system.  … Small children in the children in the Martyush settlement stayed in earthen pits, dug in the birch forest, from fall until spring. They played in those dark, cold dwelling places—digging little rivulets in the dirt walls and watching the soil run down. Fekla’s grandmother gave her grandchildren almost all of her daily allotment of bread; she died of hunger and illness in April 1932, not having survived a year. The children of the settlement rarely saw their parents, who were peasants used to working the land but were now forced to toil as industrial workers from morning to night—Fekla’s father at an aluminum factory and her mother in the mines. After her father’s arrest, the only man left in the family was her grandfather. He worked as a guard, and until his death in 1944 he helped his daughter-in-law and grandchildren as best he could. …

She last saw her father the day after his arrest on March 29, 1938. He was in the cellar of a secret-police building among tens of other prisoners—all standing because there was no room to sit. The NKVD guards pretended not to notice the children who crawled to the window to talk to the prisoners. Fekla remembers how the others told her father, “Andreev, your eldest daughter is here.” He struggled to get to the window and managed to speak only a few words to Fekla, addressing her as an adult even though she was just eleven and a half. “Now you are in charge of the family,” he said. “Educate your sisters. It is harder to oppress an educated person. Get an education, too, and do not abandon your mother and grandpa.”

“I followed his will,” Fekla concluded. …

Fekla today.

Fekla not only became an educated person who taught for many years, first at a local school and then at the university level, but also completed her dissertation on the celebrated author Alexander Pushkin. Later she also became a historian of the Martyush settlement. She collected hundreds of documents and traveled extensively through areas where the camps and settlements of the Gulag had once stood. She published several books and helped many people achieve rehabilitation: 419, by her count. …

Fekla’s father never returned, and the family did not receive any news of him. Only many years later, after Stalin’s death, did Fekla begin to search for information about his fate. Ultimately she learned that he had been condemned to death by firing squad on September 29, 1938, and executed on October 4, 1938. As one of the innocent victims of the Great Terror, he was among 725,000 people who were unjustly shot.

“It was a real genocide,” Fekla said in the film. “Why did they wipe out five generations of our family?”

Read the whole article here.  Meanwhile, we’ll try to tell some more of these women’s stories in the coming weeks.

Loquat lover

“I have spent my entire life in the remote west, where men are civilized but never get within gunshot of each other,” wrote Yvor Winters (I wrote about him yesterday here).  According to poet Kenneth Fields, who was also Winters’s gardener for four years as a graduate student, “It’s usual to think of Yvor Winters as a Chicago poet who came west and spent most of his life in California — at Stanford, where he received his PhD and taught until his retirement. This is true enough, but his actual journey is more complicated and is reflected in some of his best poems. In some ways everywhere he lived before he got to Stanford was wild — even Stanford, but that’s another story.”  The incomparable Ken tells them all in “Winters’s Wild West,” in the current Los Angeles Review of Books, based on a talk he gave last April at Claremont McKenna College.  Ken traces his Winters’s path from Chicago, to Southern California, to Seattle,  to Chicago again, to New Mexico (where he not only taught, but also spent a couple years recovering from tuberculosis in a Santa Fe sanatorium), to Boulder and then to Moscow (Idaho, not Russia), and eventually (and finally) to his Los Altos home with the loquat tree in back.  I had never eaten a loquat before my visit to Winters’s widow, Janet Lewis.  Winters said “loquats are one of the finest fruits I know, but they deteriorate rapidly after picking and so are never marketed,” which explains why.

Ken compares Robert Frost‘s late-life “To Earthward” with Winters’s “A Summer Commentary”:  “As delicate sensations diminish with age, Frost craves stronger and more painful feeling until, at the end of the poem, he wishes for death; Winters does not. Winters contrasts his youth with middle age — always earlier in those days than it is for us. (I’m counting on all those 146-year-old men to keep me middle-aged.) With the loss of sharpness of sense comes something else, especially for a writer who looks for meaning. In his youth he was a spectator — he said once that free verse was a state of mind. With age, he is a participant. His point comes home through a kind of synesthesia, a blending of the senses — the dove makes two different sounds, one in its cry, the other in flight. The repetition of soft and sweet sets the tone of the poem, as does the oxymoron “rich decay.” Winters said the brandy of the fallen fruit was no metaphor. “You could almost get drunk on the smell.”

Ken’s piece is about as good an introduction to the legendary Winters as one will find anywhere. Read it here.

Charmed by smart kids

How’s this for “Letters to a Young Poet”?

“Your poems are pretty rough, and half the time you fall flat on your face. But the piece on the airplane crash has a good deal of power, especially in the second half, and could probably be revised into a good poem. There are good fragments in several others, but you certainly contort yourself like a muscle-bound acrobat. However, we will try the famous Winters massage and electric shock treatment.”

Home sweet home.

The 1955 pep talk was given by Yvor Winters to Calvin Thomas Jr., an incoming Stegner Fellow at Stanford.  The second letter is addressed to Thomas’s father, a very moving endorsement of the son’s gifts, and some strong opinions on the poetic craft, the role of universities, and his own preeminence as a teacher. “I find myself charmed by the intelligent young, just as I am charmed by beautiful puppies,” he concludes.

The eminent Poetry Magazine published a single poem by Thomas in 1955, before he vanished from its crosshairs.

He’s been rediscovered.  According to Poetry Magazine: “Cal still writes poems, and a selection of his work can be found at poetryfoundation.org; his short story, “The Repatriate,” about a German veteran returning to civilian life, appeared in Stegner’s Stanford Short Stories series. He now lives in New Delhi.”

Read the Winters-Thomas correspondence here.  

Okay, I’ll admit it’s a tiny little square below. But it’s worth watching. The backstory:  Stephen Colbert admits that J.D. Salinger‘s Catcher in the Rye is his least favorite book, “the most important American novel I don’t get.” He prefers the Glass family stories. So he invited Tobias Wolff, author of This Boy’s Life, to convince him otherwise. “You will never convince me,” he warned on the Colbert Book Club.  Toby agreed it shouldn’t be taught to kids as mandatory high school reading:  “Part of the experience of finding that book is that it felt really subversive reading it.” The adult world is unmasked as “a nest of hypocrisy and phoniness. That’s something you want to find on your own. You don’t want your English teacher to be introducing you to the hypocrisy of adults.” So why doesn’t he, too, prefer the Glass family stories? Toby relaxed back in his chair and presented a rhetorical question: “You like to read sermons all day?” Colbert responded in a beat: “I like to give them.”  Who can argue with that?

See it all for yourself:

I met poet Daniel Rifenburgh ohhhhh… a dozen-or-so years ago.  We’ve stayed in touch since.  We had an unforgettable June evening together at the West Chester Poetry Conference.  We were in a rented car crammed with people, en route from the university to the home of Michael Peich, conference’s co-founder (with Dana Gioia).  As I recall, David Slavitt was piled into the car, too.  Can’t remember who else … plenty of people pushed into a small vehicle.

Dan was driving – as I recall he was a taxi-driver at that time, so he was pro.  Later, he taught at the University of Houston.  Now he drives an 18-wheeler flatbed rig, hauling steel out of the Port of Houston.  On that particular night, however, he had the misfortune to appoint me as his co-pilot and hand me the maps.  We quickly became confused and lost in the suburban Pennsylvania neighborhood, with its winding, pointless streets, but we were having fun, anyway.  We may have been the only ones in the car who were.  We found the party eventually, and stayed in touch over the years, respectfully addressing each other by title, always – “co-pilot.”

So I was pleased to receive in the mail his newest volume of poems, Isthmus (it was signed – what else? – “To my co-pilot, Cynthia, with admiration and affection”).  I was also pleased to hear that we have a mutual friend, Anne Stevenson.  Here’s what she wrote about his poems in London Magazine, after recounting a career that included serving in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam era, and working his way through Latin America as a reporter: “Rifenburgh is enjoyable because he ranges at large over many subjects, testing, exploring, reporting, celebrating; he has many moods … Yet, for all his ironic witticisms, Rifenburgh is, au fond, a profoundly spiritual poet, committed, like Hecht and Wilbur, to declaring his seriousness.”

A better way to get around Pennsylvania?

Other supporters include Richard Wilbur, who says his poems “can also stun the reader with a brilliant, slow-fuse image. What governs the movement of the poems is a genius for the speaking voice.”  Isthmus is dedicated to Donald Justice, who said Dan’s poems “are terrific: so fluent, so smart, and brimming with charm.”  Both Justice and Anthony Hecht figure in the poems, as dedicatees or the source of subject matter or epigrams – and Adam Zagajewski, who taught with Dan in Houston, makes a welcome guest appearance, too.  Hecht wrote, characteristically, “These poems are startling in their vividness, skill, their originality and solidity. I find that lines and images resonate long after they have served the purposes of their local contents.”

Dan said I could reprint a poem – but which?  Sometimes the first choices are best.  When I opened the book, my eyes fell on this one, and I liked it.  It grabs me still, though I haven’t read them all, so I can’t claim it’s my favorite yet.

The Fragments of Heraclitus

The name of the bow is life, but its work is death.
.                            The Fragments

The fragments of Heraclitus,
Compact, trenchant, inscrutable,

Are lovely in their resistance
To analysis. Therefore, from sympathy,

And, being immortal,
They sometimes assume human forms

To attend unnoticed the burials of critics.
They hold by their brims dark fedoras and,

Standing aloof, stolid, anonymous,
Listen respectfully to brief eulogies

While the great world sifts noiselessly
Down through time’s latticework

And the bow named life,
Accomplishing its work, later

Sends them strolling like slow arrows
Away from these shaded gravesites,

Pacing back cleansed
Into birdsong and light.

“Even those who know little of Scotland know that the Scots invented golf,” writes Bliss Carnochan in his new book, Scotland the Brave, an eminently readable book that slipped into publication so quietly this summer that I didn’t notice.

But golf?  Actually, I didn’t know.  Chalk it up to my pure and untainted ignorance of sports.  (Why get all sweaty when you could be reading?) Fortunately, Bliss gets me off the hook with the next sentence:

Of course it may not be true: a Chinese scholar has claimed that the game originated in China and was brought to Scotland by Mongolian travelers. The Netherlands also have a claim. But golf’s association with Scotland is documented since the fifteenth century. Mary, Queen of Scots, is thought to have played. Golf is so familiar that it is easy to overlook its oddity. In other ball games that depend on guiding a ball into a particular target—like soccer or hockey or lacrosse or basketball—a goalkeeper or defender usually tries to prevent the other team from scoring. Billiards, a game older than golf and also played by Mary, Queen of Scots, is one instance of another game requiring the player to guide a ball into a small cavity without interference. Perhaps golf began as an outdoor imitation of billiards. But players in only a few competitive sports are so entirely on their own and so little affected by what other competitors do (except in rare cases of a stymie, under rules now revised out of existence). The psychic loneliness of the golfer and the long-distance runner are a match. Even so, and paradoxically, golf is sociable. In what other sport do players chat with competitors over a walking distance of several miles? The dialectic of private suffering and public good humor is seldom so pronounced. Nicola Barker, author of the golf novel, The Yips (2012), calls golf “a hawk gently wrapping its wing around the shoulders of a rabbit.”

Was she a “player”?

As every duffer knows, golf is also intolerably difficult. Hitting a very small stationary ball with a very long club may not be intrinsically harder than, as in baseball, hitting a medium-sized fast-moving ball with a medium-sized bat, but the stakes, per swing, are higher, statistically and psychologically. Swing and miss in baseball and you still have two chances; swing and miss in golf—or swing and hit the ball into an undesirable spot—and you not only lose a stroke but court humiliation. For the anxiety-prone, nothing in sport is more intimidating than standing on the first tee while others watch, prepared to stifle a laugh should you miss, or to stifle a groan should you hit a slice deep into the woods. And yet, when a ball goes far astray, sociability is called for: you and your partner go hunting in the rough, or in the brush, or amidst the leaves, whacking away in an attempt to locate the missing ball and wondering how soon those playing behind will grow impatient and want to play through. What is one to think of a people who invented so masochistic and yet so sociable a sport? Though fancying myself a Scot, I decided early on that enough masochism was enough. I’ve not picked up a club in years. For the Scots, however, golf is a national treasure.

The passage gives some idea of Bliss’s amiable ruminations.  In the short book, he ambles among his own Scottish roots, the extravagant claims made for Scotland, its curious history, and a few exalted achievements.

Here’s where Bliss a man after my own heart: he lingers over the impressive taxonomies of whisky, including how Jim Murray’s description of “Ballantine’s 17 Years Old,” winner of his Whisky Bible award for 2011, “runs categorically amok: ‘deft grain and honey plus teasing salty peat’; ‘bourbon and pear drops offering the thrust’; ‘gooseberry juice offering a touch of sharpness muted by watered golden syrup’; ‘maltier tones clambering over the graceful cocoa-enriched grain’; ‘hints of smoke here and there’; ‘lashings of vanilla and cocoa on the fade’; ‘a faint spicey, vaguely smoky buzz’; ‘the most subtle oiliness imaginable.'”  I’ll settle for my own favorite, in simpler language: “The famous Laphroaig single malt from Islay is rated eight for smokiness, as high a number as that for any flavor of any whisky; anyone who has tasted it knows that it is like drinking liquid peat.”  Perhaps I’ll go fill a glass right now, and raise a toast to Queen Mary.

Postscript: I wasn’t aware of Robin Williams‘s take on the Scots and golf,  until David Palumbo-Liu alerted me to it.  Many thanks, David!