Posts Tagged ‘Vladimir Putin’

The funeral of Wagner head Yevgeny Prigozhin was held today at a private cemetery on the outskirts of St Petersburg, his home town. He died when his business jet crashed last week. It’s been two months since he staged an aborted mutiny against Russian military commanders. At that time, his troops briefly took control of the southern city of Rostov and advanced towards Moscow. Vladimir Putin did not attend the services today.

He was buried without military honors, according to Meduza, noting that instead, a few “cryptic” lines from Joseph Brodsky were placed beside his grave.

From The Guardian:

“The farewell to Yevgeny Viktorovich took place in a closed format. Those who wish to say goodbye may visit Porokhovskoye cemetery,” the press service said in its first post on Telegram in two months, ending days of speculation over how the warlord would be laid to rest.

“Pro-Russian media also published images of Prigozhin’s headstone at the Porokhovskoye cemetery. Prigozhin’s name is written on the headstone, alongside a poem by the St Petersburg-born Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky.”

I wondered which poem was it was, and was not surprised to learn it is “Nature Morte.” As I guessed, it’s the last three stanzas. In George L. Kline‘s translation:

Mary now speaks to Christ:
‘Are you my son? – or God?
You are nailed to the cross.
Where lies my homeward road?

‘Can I pass through my gate
not having understood:
Are you dead? – or alive?
Are you my son? – or God?’

Christ speaks to her in turn:
‘Whether dead or alive,
woman, it’s all the same – 
son or God, I am thine.’

We’ve written about historian Timothy Snyder ever since his book Bloodlands, here and here and here. He’s a compelling and insightful thinker, and always worth a look, but particularly about Ukraine. In a vital column from his Substack, he argues: “To be sure, there is a certain temptation to concede mentally to nuclear blackmail.  Once the subject of nuclear war is raised, it seems overwhelmingly important, and we become depressed and obsessed.  That is just where Putin is trying to lead us with his vague allusions to nuclear weapons.  Once we take his cue, we imagine threats that Russia is not actually making.  We start talking about a Ukrainian surrender, just to relieve the psychological pressure we feel.  

“This, though, is doing Putin’s work for him, bailing him out of a disaster of his own creation.  He is losing the conventional war that he started.“

More: 

War is ultimately about politics.  That Ukraine is winning on the battlefield matters because Ukraine is exerting pressure on Russian politics.  Tyrants such as Putin exert a certain fascination, because they give the impression that they can do what they like.  This is not true, of course; and their regimes are deceptively brittle.  The war ends when Ukrainian military victories alter Russian political realities, a process which I believe has begun.

The Ukrainians, let’s face it, have turned out to be stunningly good warriors.  They have carried out a series of defensive and now offensive operations that one would like to call “textbook,” but the truth is that those textbooks have not yet been written; and when they are written, the Ukrainian campaign will provide the examples.  The have done so with admirable calm and sangfroid, even as their enemy perpetrates horrible crimes and openly campaigns for their destruction as a nation.

Right now, though, we have a certain difficulty seeing how Ukraine gets to victory, even as the Ukrainians advance.  This is because many of our imaginations are trapped by a single and rather unlikely variant of how the war ends: with a nuclear detonation.  I think we are drawn to this scenario, in part, because we seem to lack other variants, and it feels like an ending.  

Using the mushroom cloud for narrative closure, though, generates anxiety and hinders clear thinking.  Focusing on that scenario rather than on the more probable ones prevents us from seeing what is actually happening, and from preparing for the more likely possible futures.  Indeed, we should never lose sight of how much a Ukrainian victory will improve the world we live in.

But how do we get there?  

Read the rest here. Please.

Maria Stepanova, one of Russia’s most recognized and honored figures – as poet, novelist, journalist, essayist, and publisher – has penned a knockout essay (translated by the excellent Sasha Dugdale) over at The Financial Times. A few excerpts :

I can’t stop looking at photographs taken in Ukraine during these unending days of war, a war so unthinkable that it’s still hard to believe in the reality of what is happening. The streets of Kharkiv — rubble, concrete beams, black holes where windows should be, the outlines of beautiful buildings with their insides burnt away. A station, a crowd of refugees trying to board a departing train. A woman carrying a dog, rushing to get to a shelter in Kyiv before the shelling begins. Bombed houses in Sumy. A maternity hospital in Mariupol after a raid — this I will not describe.

An 80-year-old friend told me of a dream she’d once had: a huge field filled with people lying in rows of iron beds. Rows and rows of people. And rising from this field, the sound of moaning. I always knew, she said, that this was to be expected. It would come to pass. Dreams about catastrophe are common in what was once called the “post-Soviet world”; other names will surely appear soon. And in these recent days and nights, the dreams have become reality, a reality more fearful than we ever thought possible, made of aggression and violence, an evil that speaks in the Russian language. As someone wrote on a social media site: “I dreamt we were occupied by Nazis, and that those Nazis were us.”

The word “Nazi” is one of the most frequently used in the political language of the Russian state. Speeches by Vladimir Putin and propaganda headlines often use the word to describe an enemy that they say has infiltrated Ukraine. This enemy is so strong that it can and must be resisted with military aggression: the bombing of residential areas, the destruction of the flesh of towns and villages, the living tissue of human fates.

The word still horrifies us, and in our world there are certainly candidates for its application. But propagandists use the word like the black spot in Treasure Island, sticking it wherever it suits them. If you call your opponent a Nazi, that explains and justifies all and any means.

***************

Right now a decision is being made about the sort of world we will live in and, in some ways, have already been sucked into: we exist and act in the black hole of another’s consciousness. It calls up archaic ideas of nationhood: that there are worse nations, better ones, nations that are higher or lower on some incomprehensible scale of greatness; that all Ukrainians (or Jews, Russians, Americans and so on) are weak, greedy, servile, hostile — and these cardboard cut-outs are already promenading through the collective imagination, just as they were before the second world war. As they say in Russia, “the dead take hold of the living”, and here these dead are ideas and concepts into which new blood flows and they begin killing, just as in a horror film.

***************

Resisting today means freeing ourselves from the dictatorship of another’s imagination, from a picture of the world that grasps us from inside and takes hold of our dreams, our days, our timelines, whether we want it or not. A battle for survival is going on right now in Ukraine; a battle for the independence of one’s own rational mind. It is going on in every house and in every head. Here as well as there, we must resist.

Read the whole thing over at The Financial Times. It’s brave; it’s stunning; it’s urgent.

Ukrainian-Russian-Jewish-American poet, writer, critic, translator and professor Ilya Kaminsky shared two tweets on Twitter. I share them with you:

Russia’s unprovoked military campaign against its neighbor Ukraine has left many of us asking: What do the Russian people think of Vladimir Putin‘s infamous and deadly adventure? Are it’s cultural leaders speaking out?

One of them has made a powerful and courageous statement.

We’ve written before about Maria Stepanova, author of the acclaimed In Memory of Memory and one of Russia foremost poets and writers. She also has another hat: she is the founding editor of the crowd-funded Colta, a high-traffic Russian online journal that has been called the Russian equivalent of The New York Review of Books.

Here’s what it had to say this week in a front-page editorial about Russia’s attack on its Ukraine, titled simply “No War”:

This morning the Russian government launched a military operation on Ukrainian territory. This is an unbelievable step. In the 21st century, when the world has trended towards reducing violence, including in international relations, this decision throws our nation back to an archaic time, politically and culturally – not even back to the to the end of the twentieth century, but back to the first half, when war still seemed to be a way of solving international problems. Civilized people have always tried to oppose violence, in whatever form it may appear and to whomever it may be directed. COLTA.RU is a publication that deals primarily with cultural issues. But today we cannot got to work as usual, pretending that nothing happened. What is happening now will become and has already become a huge tragedy for millions of people.

Let’s hope Putin listens. The whole world is watching.

“It is something very intimate, the way we communicate with the dead.”

The Guardian called 2021 “the year of Stepanova” for good reason. Russian poet Maria Stepanova’s new book, In Memory of Memory (New Directions), has been long-listed for the Booker Prize. Given the incandescent reviews, it is likely to be her break-out book in the West, giving her overdue recognition for works that have made her one of Russia’s most recognized writers. The Russian poet and essayist has two more books out this spring: The Voice Over: Poems and Essays (Columbia University Press) and War of the Beasts and the Animals (Bloodaxe).

Entitled Opinions’ host Robert Pogue Harrison interviewed her during her Stanford visit in 2016, and her words are as timely today as they were then. You can listen to the discussion HERE. The conversation began with a discussion of one of her other high-profile roles: she’s the publisher of the online Colta, Russia’s first crowd-sourced journal, which has been compared to a Russian Huffington Post and The New York Review of Books combined.

The conversation focused on the Russia’s “schizoid” treatment of the past and present.

She noted that whether he realizes it or not, Putin is performing a parody of Soviet empire. “The main difference is there is no meaning under Putin’s reign – no inner meaning, no hidden meaning, and no explicit meaning … no brand of an idea,” she said. “And so people are disoriented.”

“We’re living in a country where we have a corpse that has been lying in the Red Square  for almost a hundred years,” she said. “People still think the dead are the best governors.”

“In Russia, nothing is solid. You’re always expecting some ugly turn of reality, in your own biography or in the country’s story. Anything can happen,” she continued. “We are prepared to consider our present state acceptable as long as things don’t get worse.” Media has been replaced by propaganda, and unreliable sources have replaced informed knowledge. “The experts sitting at the roundtable are different kinds of freaks – futurologists, conspiralogists, astrologists, whatever. … Nothing is real.”

What role for poetry? Stepanova sees some positive aspects to the current turmoil: “Now the poetry audience is getting much, much wider – maybe it’s what happens in times of big historical shifts, when people are expecting poetry to give them some kind of an answer – or maybe a question.”

Stay tuned also for Stepanova’s impressive, intensely musical reading of her poem, “The Women’s Changing Room at ‘Planet Fitness.’” (Robert Harrison reads the poem in English.)

I also interviewed Stepanova for the Los Angeles Review of Books here.

About Maria Stepanova

Maria Stepanova was already an important and innovative poet by the time of Vladimir Putin’s accession, but the times called for a tougher, more public role. Today, she is one of the most visible figures in post-Soviet culture – not only as a poet, but as a journalist, a publisher, and a powerful voice for press freedom.

She is the founder of the Colta, the first independent crowd-funded source of information that exists in Russia today. The online publication has been called a Russian Huffington Post in format and style – and also compared to the New York Review of Books for the scope and depth of its long essays.

She is the author of eleven poetry collections and the recipient of several Russian and international awards (including the prestigious Andrey Bely Prize, the Berlin Brücke Prize for the novel, and Joseph Brodsky Fellowship).

You can listen to the conversation HERE. An article about Maria Stepanova’s recent Stanford talk is here. 

“Even our inner reality is ruled by the dead. They are the inner deities.”

POTENT QUOTES:

“In Russia, the dead are never dead enough.”

“The past never dies. It never goes away. It is still active.”

“We are prepared to consider our imperfect present state acceptable as long as things don’t get worse.”

“The real problem of contemporary Russia is not in our obsession with the past, but in the fear of the future.”

“If you don’t feel like you can belong to a future, then it’s very hard to feel that you can belong to a past.”