The strange workings of ‘tourbillions of Time’

KGB ‘dark blue’

Long-term followers of Calderonia, and readers of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, will know that I’m interested in different forms of Time and very fond of the expression ‘tourbillions of Time’ from Robert Graves’s poem ‘On Portents’…

Piecing together the narrative behind both the title to my collection of Russia-poems 1968-2020, The New Dark Blue Cowboys, and the last poem in it, ‘Dandling Song’, has stirred up weirder tourbillions than I recalled or ever imagined.

In 1976 I had the job of teaching a very intelligent American student, an historian, Russian up to A Level, starting more or less from scratch and with one formal session a week. There was no alternative to her working through the grammar in the Penguin Russian Course at the rate of two or three lessons a week, then having me reinforce it in our one-hour supervision (tutorial). To focus these grammatical points, and provide some light relief, I wrote a series of wacky sentences for translation. One example was ‘The new dark blue cowboys have come to town — the third ones’. Barmy, yes, but if you can get that sentence right in Russian, you have mastered five points. Another, illustrating proper- noun possessives, required translation of ‘Yura’s kvass’ (a cheap beer made from fermented black bread) into Iurin kvas… Geddit?

Ten years later I found myself teaching Russian from scratch, with an honoured and most experienced colleague, to a record number of students at the Cambridge Slavonic Department. So I expanded the ‘wacky sentences’ into about 100. I found that the sheer nonsense of them went down well and helped the memory. Particularly popular with students were ‘the new dark blue cowboys’. I made the decision (this was about 1993) to call the eventual collection of my Russia-poems that.

On a completely separate time-track, I had always wanted to write some pribautki in English (probably since hearing Stravinsky’s settings of four on the radio in the 1970s). These are short Russian traditional rhymed semi-nonsense poems, most comparable to English quasi-nonsensical nursery rhymes, jingles, or Lear’s limericks. An essential ingredient of them is figures from Russian folklore, paganism, or peasant life generally, such as hares, bears, wood demons, distaffs and mothers-in-law.

But it is extremely difficult to write ‘naive’ poetry such as nursery rhymes or pribautki if you aren’t actually ‘naive’, or at least in the right ‘naive’ mood. I remember in the 1970s jotting down some lines and rhymes, but nothing ever came of them.

Then in 1999, from having headed the FSB, successor to the KGB, Vladimir Putin became prime minister and shortly after that acting president. From my long experience of Russia I knew where this was all leading. I was running a Russian-based translation agency at the time, and I was very worried. Suddenly, the words ‘the new dark blue cowboys have come to town’ kept running through my head. I just could not understand why, but eventually the penny dropped: dark blue (sinii) in Russian is not the navy blue that dark blue is in English…it is the dark blue of the KGB (see above), contrasted with goluboi (light blue) or vasil’kovyi  (cornflower blue). And immediately, I wrote down my extended pribautka ‘Dandling Song’ without really understanding what it was all about — but that ‘aleatory’ action was as close, perhaps, as one can get to ‘naive’ these days, and I made very few changes to it over the next few days. (Although last year I added two lines.)

I’m afraid you will have to wait another three days to read my piece of Russian nonsense, but I can say now that it is my last word on Russia; or perhaps I should say Rus’ — ‘primeval’, ‘unchanging’, rural Russia.   Although when I wrote it down I still had only half a collection of ‘Russian’ poems and translations written, I knew then that ‘Dandling Song’  had to be the closing poem.

What does the poem mean? I don’t know, because it was the product of sheer nonsensical brio. I enjoyed writing it and was delighted to get characters like the cockroach and oven-prong into it. The final couplet is mere improvisation. But long afterwards I remembered the words of someone, uttered perhaps in the wake of Mrs Thatcher’s resignation, that ‘all political careers end in failure’.

Strange tourbillions over fifty years, I think you will agree.

The KGB changing guard at Lenin’s tomb, April 1981

ADVERTISEMENT

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’  Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.