From the diary of a writer-publisher: 20

16 December 2022
The Times has a long piece today entitled ‘Putin’s absence fuels rumours of Noah’s Ark plot’. It reports Putin cancelling his annual ice hockey match on Red Square, his annual press conference, and his annual ‘conversation with the people’ (the latter two are broadcast live by state television). This has led to speculation that he is not going to give his ‘state of the nation’ address to the lower and upper houses either, even though he is obliged to by his own constitution. He is said to have had a fall, to be suffering from thyroid cancer, and to have been tipsy and rambling when filmed on a recent visit to Kyrgyzstan (I saw this video on Twitter and reckoned it a fake). Is there any credibility, then, to the rumour that his cronies have set up a plan, codenamed ‘Noah’s Ark’, for him to escape to Argentina or Venezuela if he loses his war with Ukraine and is toppled?

I doubt it; he’s more the Hitler type. On the other hand, I have felt from the very beginning that the Russian military’s heart is not in this war, partly because Putin never gave them enough advance notice to prepare professionally for it. He has made them look fools. Now he is trying to shift the blame for its failure to them, staging events with generals both on their own and with him ‘listening’ to their reports/advice. If the Russian military continue to fail, and conclude that Putin is not going to go quietly, things could change. Rommel joined the plot to kill Hitler after it was obvious that they had lost the war but Hitler said the German people could ‘rot’ — i.e. that he did not care a damn about the German people — rather than him stop the war. My personal view is that if Putin died in office before this war was over, as Nicholas I did during the Crimean War that he brought on himself, it would lead in the short or medium term to a complete upheaval in Russian society comparable to that produced by Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War.

27 December
By chance, but most serendipitously, Jim Miles (Sam2) and I (Sam1) have given each other Christmas presents that commemorate our work with the late John Polkinghorne: I gave Jim a framed print of Opus 9 by Naum Gabo which we used for the cover of What Can We Hope For?, and Jim gave me this book:

No, I cannot read Japanese! But I guessed pretty quickly what it is the Japanese version of — John Polkinghorne’s book The Quantum World (1985) — because John had talked about it with some amusement. He could not read it either, but he was struck by the portraits in it of famous quantum physicists, for example this one of Paul Dirac, who taught him:

What amused him was the rays that seem to be emanating from the great physicists’ heads: were they a form of halo? He seriously wondered what they were intended to convey. Was it a Japanese convention? Are they a feature of the Japanese iconographic tradition and would be instantly understandable to the Japanese reader?

Sam2 was quick to explain: ‘I think in the first place that the portraits are there to bring the physicists to life for the reader — to put faces to names, especially for Japanese readers who could be intensely curious what these people looked like — and then the shapes, or ‘rays’, coming out of them are a bit mysterious, but I think they could represent light, as some of the portraits appear to ‘bend’ the rays. The subtle perspective changes applied to the portraits (and the rays) could be a very clever physics reference that is going over our heads (or certainly mine)…’

3 January 2023
Every year at this time I read in Russian some of Joseph Brodsky’s Christmas (or ‘Nativity’) poems. Whenever possible, he wrote a poem at Christmas, believing that, as he said in an interview, ‘Christmas is the birthday of the God-Man, and it’s as natural for people to celebrate that as their own birthday’.

Nevertheless, there was little specifically religious about his early, longer Christmas poems (1962-71), which I read at the time in blurry carbon samizdat. Gradually he focussed on ‘the cave’, as he called it, with Mary, Joseph and the Child, the star and the magi. To those who knew him in the 1970s and 80s, it comes as a shock to see him referred to now as a Christian poet. In retrospect, though, perhaps it should have been obvious. When I spent part of an evening with Brodsky in Leningrad on 11 January 1970 and asked him why he was so attracted to John Donne, he said it was because Donne ‘represents a vital period in the development of Western Christianity since the Greeks’; I was amazed he didn’t refer to Donne’s poetics. He admired and recommended Kierkegaard’s Either/Or.

Joseph Brodsky, c. 1969. Photographer unknown, Patrick Miles archive

Brodsky’s untitled 1989 Christmas poem begins ‘Imagine, by striking a match, that night in the cave’. Every year I start translating it in my head, but I can’t replicate his tone (expressed in rhymed couplets of amphibrach tetrameter), or the compression that the highly inflected Russian language allows him, so shake my head over its impossibility. Seamus Heaney, using presumably a literal translation by his Russianist son, makes a very good English poem out of it. Heaney’s ear is faultless, so he certainly catches the amphibrach tone, but it entails more English words and a much longer line. Also, he rhymes only once and that rhyme is badly strained. Not having the Russian ringing in his head, Heaney can paraphrase in English as he sees fit (or perhaps in the direction of what he assumes Brodsky meant). To know the source language intimately may not be an advantage for the translator of poetry…au contraire!

7 January
I’m relieved to receive a Christmas card from a couple who support Putin’s war on Ukraine. She is Russian, he English. On their card last Christmas they told me that I shouldn’t believe everything I read in the British press about Russia and Ukraine, so I thought that this year, knowing my stance on the issue, they would cast me off altogether. She believes Ukraine has no legitimacy, she ignores the facts of its history since 1945, she protests that Crimea, Odessa, Luhansk and Donetsk ‘are Russian’, and is exasperated by Ukraine’s criminal corruption after 1991, as though Putin were shining white. She believes Russia is doing the right thing, because she ‘loves’ Russia. I was once at a gathering where the Russian wife of eminent British Slavist X, referring to X’s dislike of Putin, also exclaimed: ‘The trouble is, X doesn’t l-o-o-o-ve Russia!’ (and there was a suggestion that if he loved her, he should love her country). It is difficult to know what to say when political discourse is at such an irrational level. Essentially, these women are possessed by the ‘my country right or wrong’ attitude, which can never be ethical. I am relieved, though, that the card-senders have not terminated a forty-year friendship that saw better times.

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.