Calderonia

War and woof poetry

Posted on May 11, 2022 by Patrick Miles

Judging by allusions and quotations in his speeches, Volodymyr Zelensky either has a good knowledge of literature himself, or his team does. Unlike Putin, he speaks in a cultured manner, beautifully clearly and expressively, with a literary turn.

In an appeal to the Russian nation before 24 February, Zelensky quoted from a 1961 poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko that has no title, but is known by its first line:

Do Russians want war?
Go and ask the stillness
over steppe and ploughed field,
ask the birches and poplars.
Go and ask the soldiers
who lie beneath those birches,
and their sons will tell you
whether Russians want war…

Yevtushenko’s poetry became very popular in Britain after the appearance of the above selection in 1962, vigorously translated by Peter Levi and Robin Milner-Gulland. The energy, love interest and note of rebellion perfectly suited 1960s English poetry. I bought the book when I was seventeen and two years later was reading Yevtushenko in Russian. Love lyrics such as ‘Deep Snow’, ‘My beloved will arrive at last’, or ‘When your face rose over my crumpled life’, had a fermentative effect on me at the time, as I’ve acknowledged in the Notes to stanza 6 of Making Icons.

By the mid-1970s, however, it was clear that Yevtushenko was not so much a rebel against the Soviet regime as a consummate compromiser with it. Thank God, he never wrote such chauvinist rant as Pushkin’s ‘To the Slanderers of Russia’ or Blok’s ‘Scythians’, but even his poem ‘Do Russians want war?’ wobbles on the issue. The suggestion in it that it was Russia alone who defeated Nazi Germany, and that Soviet soldiers fell ‘so that the people of the whole Earth/could dream in peace’, reminds me too much of the posters that Soviet propagandists put up in Berlin after the War captioned My khotim mira, which can mean both ‘We want peace’ and ‘We want the World’…

But I would never dismiss Yevtushenko as a poet or a person. He was prodigiously talented, in poetry, prose, film and self-performance. His was a big and perhaps tragically insecure personality. It seems to me that in his verse he consciously adapted the styles of Mayakovsky and Yesenin. Like Yesenin, he wrote a woefully sentimental poem about a dog. Here it is, in an affectionate translation-parody made by me when I was twenty-one:

TO MY DOG

My dog, his black nose pressed against the glass,
waits for the sound of feet along the path.

I run my hand through his coat,
like him am waiting for someone to appear.

Do you remember, dog, not so long ago
when a woman was living here?

But what after all was she to me?
A sister or a wife maybe,

at times a daughter, so it seemed,
whom I was bound to help somehow.

She’s far away… And you’re so subdued.
No other women will come here now.

My dear old dog, you’re not a bad codger,
but what a pity you don’t drink vodka!

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.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged Alexander Blok, Alexander Pushkin, Berlin, compromise, dogs, Nazi Germany, Peter Levi, propaganda, Red Army, Robin Milner-Gulland, Russia, Russian poetry, sentimentality, Sergei Yesenin, talant, To Russia's Slanderers, translation, USSR, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vladimir Putin, Volodomyr Zelensky, war poetry, World War 2, Yevgeny Yevtushenko | Leave a comment

A writer-publisher’s Ukrainian diary: 4

Posted on May 5, 2022 by Patrick Miles

23 April 2022

The procession has just set off through Stratford-upon-Avon. Foreground: the Shakespeare Institute’s delegation. Background: the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.

It is St George’s Day, hypothetically William Shakespeare’s birthday, and we are in Stratford-upon-Avon witnessing the civic celebrations, which are beautifully done, inclusive, happy, humorous, almost a Spring flower festival, and a really moving tribute to Shakespeare’s ever-freshness. The previous evening, we had lived through a searing performance of Henry VI(2): Machtpolitik at its most brutal and realistic.

I keep coming back to the necessity of not letting our yearning for peace develop into wishful thinking about it. The problem is that reality is terrible, we would rather not have to face it, but if we lose our mental grip on it we risk fantasy and pure self-gratification (even virtue-signalling). A person born in Britain whose parents originated in the Donbas says that ‘any negotiations would be better than this killing’. It sounds true, stopping killing in order to negotiate sounds right, and a part of us wants peace ‘at any price’. But hostilities don’t usually stop during negotiations anyway, and the person who launched this criminal war against Ukraine self-evidently does not want genuine negotiations and peace. I heard Volodymyr Zelensky myself tell Clive Myrie ten days ago on television that he, Zelensky, ‘spent the first two years of my presidency trying to talk to Putin’.

24 April
A few days back, a GP Tweeted that judging by the activity of Putin’s left arm as he was sitting giving orders to his Minister of Defence, Putin has ‘late onset Rett syndrome’ and ‘probably has months to live’. Again, this might be a highly desirable diagnosis, but I don’t think it matches reality. Anyone who observed the way Putin from his earliest presidential years marched up a long red carpet, could see that he has a ‘torque’ in his body and swings with his right arm. We don’t know the origin of it, but the weakness in his left arm doesn’t seem to me to have got any worse. On the other hand, his face in recent years has become more and more bloated. Most people would assume he is on steroids. But what does this portend, and does it explain anything about his psychotic state?

26 April
Russian autocracy has a tradition of long-serving ministers of foreign affairs. There was Gorchakov, foreign minister for 25 years under Alexander II; Gromyko, Soviet foreign minister for 29 years; now there is Sergei Lavrov, foreign minister since 2004.

Lavrov is approaching Talleyrand’s genius for utterances that are so ambiguous, depending on the listener, that ultimately they mean nothing. Today in Moscow he said that he was convinced the war would end in ‘some kind of treaty’, but he added the wise-sounding rider that it would ‘depend, of course, on the military situations reached’. This could mean ‘stalemate as a result of Ukrainian successes’, or it could mean ‘Russian conquest of Ukraine and a deal with the puppet government we have always wanted to install’. Similarly, Lavrov opined that ‘in essence’ NATO was ‘engaging in a proxy war against Russia’. It sounds right, rather clever and persuasive in fact, but omits to mention that it was Russia invaded its neighbour Ukraine, brutally breaking international law, and it is Ukrainians who are defending their own country. Putin’s proxies in eastern Ukraine, e.g. the Wagner Group, have been Russians.

Sergei Lavrov in pensive mood

Actually, I believe that Lavrov is beginning to sweat. He is a ‘career diplomat’ who for years has made a more than comfortable living out of going along with Putin. Now the chips are down. The genuinely wise Andrei Kozyrev, who was Yel’tsin’s foreign minister and now lives in the U.S., said this of his former colleague when asked recently if Lavrov did not know that everything he was doing was wrong:

I’m not a psychologist. What I see is that people sometimes degrade morally. And again, it’s step by step. On the first step, you sell your soul. But the Faustian scene rarely unfolds immediately before you. The Devil doesn’t come in with a contract ‘dripping with blood’. It takes some time before you start to actually disregard human dignity.

The ghosts of Joachim von Ribbentrop, say, or Saddam Hussein’s long-serving foreign minister Tariq Aziz, should be troubling Sergei Lavrov.

28 April
Today The Times ran a long article by their Defence Editor entitled ‘Push to send arms before Russians encircle Donbas’. But really it could add nothing to what we have known since 19 April: the Ukrainians in East Ukraine are in a highly vulnerable situation and there’s no knowing how their attack/defence there will play out. The arms, of course, are vital, but so will be brilliant generalship. I am no military man, but I was brought up on Chester Wilmot’s 800-page The Struggle for Europe and I spent years immersed in World War 1 whilst writing my biography of George Calderon. I incline, therefore, to see the coming struggle in East Ukraine as a combination of WW2’s tank battles and WW1’s trench warfare (the Ukrainians have been dug in there for eight years). On paper Russia’s artillery and rocket power are overwhelming, so the trenches could be devastated. It will surely be vital for the Ukrainians not only to avoid being surrounded, but to withdraw to a hard salient which they can successfully hold and from which they can counterattack…

2 May
The Russian campaign has so far been a disaster for Putin: according to a leaked FSB assessment from last year, under sanctions the economy can survive only till June, the attack on Kiev and attempt to kill Zelensky failed spectacularly, the army’s atrocities have earned Putin global detestation and condemnation, the Russians still do not have domination of the air over Ukraine, Khar’kiv and Mariupol are still not securely in Russian hands, the Ukrainians have sunk the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet and other vessels, a quarter of a million young Russians have left Russia since 24 February and don’t intend coming back, now Russians are streaming across to Moldova from Transnistria as they don’t want to live under Putin either, and in David Petraeus’s words ‘the war seems to be forging Ukraine as a nation state even as it weakens Russia as an empire’. Putin has achieved the exact opposite of what he intended, then, as well as uniting and expanding NATO and personally bringing Russia closer to direct conflict with it. Andrei Kozyrev even believes the war is ‘unwinnable for Putin because he fights against the people’.

Yet Putin will continue, because he is doing it all for ‘Russia’…and La Russie, c’est moi. One can imagine him destroying everything around him like Hitler until he is left in a bunker. And as if the sheer relentless, sickening, senseless destruction and killing weren’t enough, he and his generals actually look sub-human: Gerasimov, Dvornikov, Mizintsev (‘the butcher of Mariupol’) are brutally ugly. I think of the mayor in Gogol’s Government Inspector: ‘All I can see around me are pigs’ snouts where there should be faces.’

4 May
Understandably, the question ‘why are the Russians like this?’ is still being debated in the press. One big explanation given is that Russia was deeply brutalised by seventy years of state genocide and ‘casual savagery is seared into its soul’ (David Aaronovitch). A second is that no one was ever held to account for the long night of terror. A third is that Russians have made no concerted attempt to come to terms with their twentieth-century past. That process started under Gorbachev and Yel’tsin, but was foreclosed by Putin.

Explanation (3) is what Russian dissidents and ‘catacomb Christians’ (i.e. Russian believers who reject the KGB-led Moscow Patriarchate) have long said. In the second volume of her memoirs, Nadezhda Mandel’shtam wrote of Russian society: ‘Until we have made sense of our past, there is no hope of rebirth.’ A Russian catacomb Christian wrote to me in 2010: ‘We are going nowhere because there has been no repentance, no recognition of our sins and errors, and no atonement for them.’

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

‘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

‘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.

Posted in Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Aleksei Gromyko, Aleksei Kozyrev, Alexander Gorchakov, atonement, catacomb Christians, Charles Talleyrand, Chester Wilmot, comments, David Aaronovitch, David Petraeus, General Dvornikov, General Gerasimov, General Mezintsev, Henry VI, Joachim von Ribbentrop, KGB, Khar'kiv, Mariupol, medical diagnoses, military strategy, Moldova, Moscow Patriarchate, Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, NATO, Nikolai Gogol, proxy war, repentance, Rett Syndrome, Russia, Saddam Hussein, salients, Sergei Lavrov, St George's Day, steroids, Stratford-upon-Avon, tank battles, Tariq Aziz, The Donbas, Transnistria, trench warfare, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelensky, Wagner Group, William Shakespeare, World War 2, World War I | Leave a comment

A Not Nursery Rhyme

Posted on April 29, 2022 by Patrick Miles

DANDLING SONG

The cockroach and the hare
sat up and stared
when the new dark blue cowboys came down.

The wife bounced the cat
more and more on her lap
when the new dark blue cowboys rode into town.

When the new dark blue cowboys came to town
the little brown chub
leapt up on a tub,
the skinny kikimora
squeaked her femora,
and the oven-prong curly
proved quite unruly.

Then the new dark blue cowboys turned into mice
and vanished again through a hole in the ice.

wife – baba, a married peasant woman
kikimora – a very thin female house spirit
oven-prong – ukhvat, a short pitchfork with turned back tips used for putting pots in/out of an oven
With thanks to Sam2 for his motif-friezes © Patrick Miles, 2022

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

‘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

‘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.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged cats, chub, cockroaches, comments, cowboys, dandling songs, dark blue, folklore, hares, KGB, kikimora, mice, nonsense rhymes, nursery rhymes, oven-prong, poems, pribautki, Rus', Russia, The New Dark Blue Cowboys | 1 Comment

The strange workings of ‘tourbillions of Time’

Posted on April 26, 2022 by Patrick Miles

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

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

‘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

‘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.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged 'Dandling Song', 'On Portents', aleatory, chronotopes, colours, dark blue, Edward Lear, folklore, George Calderon, Igor' Stravinsky, KGB, Lenin's mausoleum, Margaret Thatcher, naive, nonsense poetry, nursery rhymes, Penguin Russian Course, pribautki, Robert Graves, Russian grammar, Russian language, teaching Russian, The New Dark Blue Cowboys, tourbillions of Time, Valdimir Putin | 1 Comment

A writer-publisher’s Ukrainian diary: 3

Posted on April 23, 2022 by Patrick Miles

11 April 2022
Whilst coming back from the shop with today’s newspaper, I could see a neighbour on the other side of the street who was born at the gates of Mauthausen concentration camp six days before it was liberated by American troops in 1945. She intimated that she wanted a word, so I crossed the street to her, but she had a hair appointment to get to. She stood very straight, paused, then said quietly: ‘It looks as though we have let people down yet again…’ She was referring to the 1930s, and the comparison with appeasement is utterly appropriate. I still cannot see that the West had any military strategy for deterring Putin before 24 February. NATO troops, in ridiculously small numbers, are now being rushed to its eastern borders, especially on the Baltic, but this is purely reactive and defensive. If it had been done before Christmas, and at particularly sensitive border points, it would have sent a different, proactive message. We did not ‘lose’ the initiative, we never showed any.

13 April
I see that a number of heavyweights have disagreed on the Times Letters page today with yesterday’s article by Max Hastings headed ‘Only a sordid bargain will end Ukraine’s war: Defeating Putin or calling his nuclear bluff are unrealistic options’. It’s true that the article was unusually confused for Hastings. Defeatism seemed to keep bobbing up in it, but the editorial headline was a flagrant distortion of what he had written, which was: ‘I remain unhappily convinced that the war will end, or at least be paused, through some sordid bargain that does not punish Russia as it deserves.’ So he doesn’t believe this ‘bargain’ would end the war… He is fumbling here with the reality that, like a lot of people, he can’t bring himself to accept (‘Human kind/Cannot bear very much reality’): Putin is determined to occupy the WHOLE of Ukraine and is a barefaced liar, therefore any ‘bargain’ with him is worthless. Victory in the short, medium or longer term is the only course for Ukraine and the democratic world.

16 April
One really wonders whether Putin has been told the truth about the sinking of the Black Sea Fleet’s flagship. Who had the courage to tell him? An Army man, presumably…

Bellingcat tells us that Sergei Beseda, since 2009 head of the FSB’s Fifth Service responsible for intelligence about Ukraine and efforts to subvert it, has been put in prison and over a hundred of his agents sacked, basically for telling Putin what he wanted to hear in the run-up to the invasion (‘Our troops will be met with garlands’), rather than the truth. This is always a problem in an autocracy, of course. In fact it is one of autocracy’s biggest self-destruct mechanisms. As I have said, self-delusion is an occupational hazard for Russian intelligence men. It is quite possible that Beseda and his agents didn’t even know they were lying: they really ‘saw’ Ukraine as a country ready to betray itself.

A British classicist who worked at Bletchley on decoding Japanese signals during the War told me that the Japanese were so convinced their language was too hard for any foreigner to learn, that they let cats out of bags. In 1970s Britain the London branch of the KGB informed Moscow that the country was on the brink of a revolution fomented by them!

19 April
Another wonderful extended lunch with Sam2 at Polonia, Cambridge’s Polish club dating from World War 2, discussing marketing over Polish dishes and four different vodkas… Polonia was first off the starting block in this area of Cambridge with clothes, food and medical supplies for Ukraine. They are still collecting money for the refugee effort, and selling a range of fundraising cards for http://hospitallers.life, including:

On the same day, President Zelensky tells us what we have been dreading: ‘The Russian troops have begun the battle for the Donbas, for which they have been preparing for a long time. A significant part of the entire Russian army is now concentrated on this offensive. No matter how many Russian troops are driven there, we will fight. We will defend ourselves. We will do it every day.’

They will. But they are in a terribly vulnerable position, liable to be surrounded if the Russian offensive is better conducted than it was in the west of the country. The open country of the Donbas is far more favourable to tanks, and there is talk of the imminent tank battle being the biggest since 1945. It is still conceivable that the Russian advance will go to the Dnipro and Ukraine be partitioned (until Putin attacks again).

Yet there are so many imponderable variables. We simply do not know how much armour and how many state of the art weapons are getting through to the eastern front from NATO countries, we do know how badly the infantry of top-down Russia performs, we do not know what the Ukrainian Army’s big strategy is, but we do know that their soldiers are battle-hardened, have the ability to think and act for themselves that comes with living in a democracy, and their motivation and morale are second to none.

My fear is that the shift of action to the Donbas will be a mental jump too far for Europe and the U.S. (‘a quarrel in a faraway country’, God forbid); that their interest will flag and they will start talking of a deal with Putin before his army has been ground to a standstill.

22 April
I know the ‘open country’ west of Donetsk, in which some of the tank battle will rage, as ‘steppeland’, because I travelled through it on 20 June 1970 and it was so reminiscent of Chekhov’s The Steppe (although that was based on the steppe around Rostov). The weather was glorious, the train slowly undulated along, the countryside looked not much different from nineteenth century paintings. I was going to the Crimea, to visit Chekhov’s house at Yalta and catch a ship to Vienna, but had had to travel northwards from Taganrog because the whole Black Sea coast around the naval centre of Zhdanov (Mariupol) was closed to foreigners. On the warm night of 19 June I got out at a junction called Yasinovataya, just north of Donetsk. I had a meal in the station restaurant and my table companions discussed turning me over to the police as a suspicious foreigner. I showed them my passport and travel papers, then made for the train fast. I had a bench to sleep on, fully clothed, in an obshchii vagon (third-class open carriage). It was one side of a small doorless compartment that I shared with a young woman who looked like a ‘collective farm worker’. I suspect she thought I was a seminarist, because of my beard. She smiled, but never said a word. Once or twice in the night she suckled her baby. I arrived at Simferopol next day after a twenty-one hour journey, from where I got to Yalta in a taxi between two very large, sweltering ladies. I thought (the) Ukraine was paradise.

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

‘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

‘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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged 'The Steppe', Anton Chekhov, appeasement, Bellingcat, Bletchley, Cambridge, Crimea, Czechoslovakia, Dnipro, Donbas, Donetsk, FSB, KGB, Mauthausen, Max Hastings, morale, NATO, Nazi Germany, Polonia, Russia, Sergei Beseda, Simferopol, steppeland, tank battles, The Times, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelensky, Yalta, Yasinovataya, Zhdanov | 4 Comments

‘The negation of everything worth living for’

Posted on April 18, 2022 by Patrick Miles

Portrait of Alexander III
by Ivan Kramskoi, 1886

In 2010, when the Putin Project was still just a monocracy and one could converse freely over the phone with friends in Russia, I remarked to one that Russia seemed to have ‘reached about 1892’, i.e. a point during the reign of Alexander III. Press censorship was well under way (my friend had just lost his job as an investigative journalist on a newspaper taken over by Putin), democracy was being ‘managed’ at every level, Orthodoxy had fused with official nationalism, male life expectancy was heading for what it had been in the 1890s, the economy was dominated by a kind of State capitalism, and unprecedented numbers of Russians were leaving to live abroad.

Little did I know that Alexander III is Putin’s hero! This was explained to me recently by an admirer of the Putin Project, who added that Putin does not in fact hanker after the Soviet Union, because he regards the Communists as bunglers, compared with Alexander III who had the true interests of Greater Russia at heart. The fact that Alexander III’s sobriquet is Mirotvorets (‘The Peacemaker’), because no major wars were fought in his reign, is irrelevant, as Ukraine, Poland, Estonia, Finland were already under his thumb. Instead, Alexander III made war on Russian Jews, of whom his ideologist Pobedonostsev said a third would die, a third emigrate, and a third be completely assimilated.

Joseph Conrad was speaking primarily of the Russia created by Alexander III when, taking issue with Bismarck’s motto La Russie, c’est le néant (nothingness), he wrote in ‘Autocracy and War’ (1905) that Russia is ‘not a Néant: she is and has been simply the negation of everything worth living for’. He knew what he was talking about: his whole family had been exiled to Russia for his father’s part in the fight for Polish independence, his mother died of TB there, and his experience of Russia deeply traumatised him.

Conrad extended his definition to the whole of Russia’s past: ‘From the very inception of Russia’s being, the brutal destruction of dignity, of truth, of rectitude, of all that is faithful in human nature has been the imperative of her existence.’ The prime cause, as he saw it, was the form of government called ‘autocracy’: ‘From the very first ghastly dawn of her existence as a state Russia found nothing but the arbitrary will of an obscure autocrat at the beginning and end of her organisation. […] there has never been any legality in Russia; she is a negation of that as of everything else that has its root in reason or conscience.’ I think I could show that there has been legality in Russia, but I certainly agree with him that the Russian people’s preference for autocracy is the cause of Russia’s awfulness.

The surreal contempt for truth — a mendacity verging on insanity — the elemental hatred, the barbarism, destruction and nihilism of the war on Ukraine are enough to convince people that official Russia, Russia as a state, Russia the Putin autocracy, has again become ‘the negation of everything worth living for’. I believe this and it’s certainly depressing.

How did it come about? After the collapse of communism, Russians at last had the opportunity to create a democracy and rule of law, but they were easily distracted and somehow ended up regarding democracy as an expectation ‘imposed’ upon them by the West. Russia must have a different, ‘exclusive’ future. In the early 2000s Russian intellectuals began openly debating what ideology was needed to ‘fill the vacuum’ (the phrase often used) left by Soviet ideology. I was frankly aghast: so they were not interested, after all, in values, for instance freedom, truthfulness, legality, incorruptibility, tolerance, the mainsprings of a way of doing things without killing people, they were interested in an ideology. And Putin gave them one: his own crackpot version of Russia’s past, its religion, its greatness, its exclusive autocratic ‘identity’ that qualifies it to do what it likes. (‘He lives in a world of his own’, remarked Angela Merkel, after a visit in which she was purposely terrorised by Putin’s large dog.) Let us remind ourselves that in Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? Andrei Amal’rik said that ‘the mass ideology of this country has always been the cult of its own power and size’.

There has also always been a strong streak of irrationalism, satanry and apocalyptic self-destruction in Russian culture and politics. In the post-perestroika period of so-called anarchy, during which Russia rejected democracy and espoused nationalism, these demons escaped from their boxes, and Putin mistakenly thinks he can ‘manage’ them.

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

‘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

‘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.

Posted in Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Alexander III, anarchy, Andrei Amal'rik, Angela Merkel, anti-Semitism, apocalypse, autocracy, censorship, Communism, democracy, dogs, Estonia, ideology, irrationalism, Jewish people, Joseph Conrad, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Moscow Patriarchate, Otto von Bismarck, perestroika, Poland, Putin Project, rule of law, satanry, State capitalism, Ukraine, USSR, Vladimir Putin | 2 Comments

A writer-publisher’s Ukrainian diary: 2

Posted on April 11, 2022 by Patrick Miles

5 April 2022
When I contemplated the image from Kyiv that I posted last week, as well as Bruegel I thought of Isaac Babel’s stories Red Cavalry about the Russo-Polish War of 1919-21. Some of that war took place in Ukraine, and the stories are full of extreme, gratuitous, brutal violence. I thought particularly of ‘Crossing the River Zbrucz’, in which the narrator is billeted at a heavily pregnant Jewess’s with three Jews, one of whom is asleep pressed up to the wall, completely covered by a blanket. Eventually the Jewess takes the blanket off, to reveal a man with his throat torn out and his face hacked to pieces. She recounts factually, coldly, how he was killed in her presence, then she explodes: ‘And now I want to know, I want to know — where in the whole world will you find such a father as this my father?’ As with Bruegel’s paintings, one needs strong nerves to read these stories. Babel had learnt well certain lessons from Chekhov about depicting terrible things. And yet the stories are also saturated with an other-worldly beauty reminiscent of Georg Trakl’s poems of World War I. I recommend reading Red Cavalry in our follower David McDuff’s translation:

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

6 April
We Russia-watchers were utterly wrong — I am glad to say — in thinking that Kyiv would ‘fall in 72 hours’. But I don’t regret attaching the name Machiavelli (whose Prince I was re-reading at the time) to the methods by which Putin would attempt to enslave the Ukrainian state. We know from the intelligence made public that his plan was to destabilise it with lies, sabotage and assassination, then ‘decapitate’ it by capturing Kyiv and ‘liquidating’ the government. Putin failed, because of the heroic solidarity and morale of the Ukrainian people. But European intelligence told us that he also drew up plans to stage public executions in captured Ukrainian spaces to break morale, and that is exactly what his soldiers did to order at Bucha. Pure Machiavelli. Moreover, the sickening sight of Mariupol reminds one of Machiavelli’s words: ‘Whoever becomes master of a city accustomed to freedom and does not destroy that city, may expect to be destroyed himself, because when there is a rebellion, such a city justifies itself by calling on the name of liberty and its ancient institutions, never forgotten despite the passing of time’…

7 April
The West failed to deter the invasion of Ukraine by issuing threats/performing threatening actions that meant something, and there is no evidence that NATO had a military plan for what to do when the invasion happened. Joe Biden said that Putin ‘could not stay in power’ and the world speculated wildly about what he meant. When intelligence indicated that Putin was about to use chemical weapons in Ukraine, Biden said that if he did ‘NATO will respond in kind’, again he didn’t say what that meant, no-one knew, and he was widely mocked. Very curiously, though, these black holes have turned out to be an advantage, because Putin could not know what we were going to do next, either, and keeping your enemy guessing is a vital weapon. Meanwhile, Biden ramps up his completely justified accusation that Putin is a war criminal, yet baulks at exporting antiquated planes and tanks to Ukraine because the U.S. is already sending more anti-aircraft and anti-armour missiles than anyone else. Biden is not looking as stupid as everyone convinced themselves, starting with D. Trump. Perhaps Biden’s age has even given him wisdom.

And the reality, it turns out, is that we had been supplying Ukraine with weapons and training its soldiers to use them all along. According to yesterday’s Times, British troops ‘deployed to Ukraine in the months leading to the invasion’, trained ‘droves’ of Ukrainian soldiers in the use of anti-tank weapons, ‘counter-sniper techniques, how to defend against heavy armour and how to fight in urban battles’, Britain had already given Ukraine 5000 Mlaw anti-tank weapons, and ‘is in the process of shipping another 5000 and other explosive weapons’. As we know, in the hands of the utterly motivated Ukrainian Army these have been very effective. We can safely assume, I think, that other members of NATO have been doing the same. Putin could not stop them, never complains in public about it as that would expose his own impotence, and we are completely at liberty to continue because both Ukraine and the members of NATO are sovereign states. I agree with Chris Deverell, who was head of Joint Forces Command 2016-19 and said two days ago that the West’s supply of lethal weapons to Ukraine was ‘not enough’ and western allies should ‘mobilise their military capability to force Putin’s hyenas out’:

We have to do more for Ukraine. We cannot sit and watch this bestiality imposed on a free and democratic people. If we are deterred by Russia’s nuclear weapons now, why would we not also be when [Putin] attacks a NATO country? No, it’s a choice, and we can make a different one.

One could claim, then, that NATO had a covert plan, or at least policy, before the invasion, but it was not deterrent, only punitive once the invasion happened. If Ukraine is to be helped to save itself, we must continue with that plan now that it is out in the open; we must continue to supply them with the arms and military consultancy that they need to win the war themselves. At the same time, Andrew Tatham was absolutely right to stress lateral thinking in this war. Considering the fear that Putin’s hackers had struck into the West before the invasion, they seem to have been remarkably ineffectual since (the waves of Cyrillic spam that crashed down on Calderonia, for instance, in the days of the invasion, soon dried up); one might speculate that our own cyber attacks on Russia have been discreetly more effective. I see no other way forward than doing everything in our power to assist Ukraine with weapons, consultancy, intelligence and cyber-power to win. I continue to believe that in a bad-case scenario NATO could occupy Western Ukraine in a joint exercise with the Ukrainian Army (whose government would be at L’viv) and Putin would not dare attack NATO forces. So far he has not tried seriously to cut off the supply lines from the West, nor does he have the control of western Ukrainian airspace to do so.

8 April
When I go out these days, I am stopped by neighbours who want to talk about Ukraine. They are aghast at something they never thought to see ‘in Europe’ in their lifetime, and ask me how I think it will ‘end’. Well, of course, there are so many big variables that I certainly don’t know… My private scenarios, from better to worst, might be:

With massive military (and naval) aid from the West, Ukraine comprehensively defeats Russian forces and the invaders are driven out of Ukraine. The Russian defeat is as bad as in the Crimean War or Russo-Japanese War and Putin is deposed, closely followed by Lukashenko. Ukraine becomes a sovereign European state, Belarus too.
Russia takes the Donbas this month and Ukraine sues for peace recognising the Crimea and Donbas as Russian. The West funds reconstruction, Ukraine is set to join the EU in eight years, NATO gives securities of neutrality to Ukraine.
Putin re-invades Ukraine from the north and the West’s guarantees are again dud. The Russians take Kiev this time and simultaneously advance westwards to the Dnipro. Govt escapes to L’viv, NATO forces co-occupy Western Ukraine, country partitioned.
Putin bully-blackmails Lukashenko into invading Western Ukraine from Belarus whilst Russian troops take Kiev, simultaneously advance westwards from the Dnipro and join the Belorussians to occupy Western Ukraine. NATO watches from across the border. Russian troops face NATO and an iron curtain descends again across the continent.

One thing is sure: for Putin there is no going back. As the British-born Putin-watcher and former White House adviser Fiona Hill has said, he sees the Ukrainians as ‘traitors’ and has switched from trying to capture their country to ‘annihilating’ them. But by the same token, Putin is a rat caught in his own trap.

The other question neighbours ask me, is: ‘What is wrong with the Russians, why are they like this?’ I might tackle that in my next post.

9 April
In the summer of 1968 I spent six radiant weeks in Kiev. Cautiously and on my own, I visited Babi Yar, the ravine on the outskirts of Kiev where from 1941 the Germans and their collaborators massacred 34,000 Jews and about 100,000 humans of other origins. Much of the area was screened by wooden hoardings as it was going to be built on. Diggers had been at work. In places gaps had appeared between the hoardings and through them I saw a sea of bones. Two years earlier, in response to public Russian and western protest, the Soviet government had erected a small monument there:

Photograph taken by me of temporary monument at Babi Yar, 1968

This monument did not mention the ethnicities of the victims, but over time the site was developed into a memorial park and in 2016 work began on the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Centre there. This is the one that was hit by a Russian missile on 1 March 2022.

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

‘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

‘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.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged 'The Prince', Aleksandr Lukashenko, Andrew Tatham, Anton Chekhov, atrocities, Babi Yar, Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Centre, Belarus, Belorussia, Bucha, Chris Deverell, comments, Crimea, David McDuff, Donald Trump, Donbas, EU, Fiona Hill, Georg Trakl, Isaac Babel, Joe Biden, Kyiv, L'viv, Mariupol, Military Intelligence, NATO, Nazis, Niccolo Machiavelli, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Red Cavalry, The Times, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, weapons, World War I, Zbrucz | Leave a comment

A writer-publisher’s Ukrainian diary: 1

Posted on April 4, 2022 by Patrick Miles

16 March 2022
Tony Blair has said that to keep telling Putin all the things we won’t do in the face of Putin’s carnage (e.g. enforce a no-fly zone, give Ukraine Polish MiGs, co-occupy and safeguard Western Ukraine with the Ukrainian Army, guarantee Ukraine from nuclear attack), is ‘a strange strategy’. Worse, it is encouraging Putin to continue his insane war. For almost the first time in my life, I find myself agreeing with Blair.

28 March
Joe Biden called Putin ‘a war criminal’, to screams of protest from Moscow, but Biden is literally right. Now he has called Putin ‘a butcher’ who ‘cannot stay in power’, to screams of ‘gaffe!’ from the West. I don’t for one moment believe that by ‘cannot stay in power’ Biden meant ‘the U.S. will remove him’; I think most people believe he was saying ‘such a madman simply has to go’. He was expressing his outrage. As I have said myself, there are certainly Russians who want to remove Putin for morally and economically ruining their country, and I bet they are about it. Personally, I find it a relief to discover that a President of the United States still dares say publicly what millions of us are thinking.

29 March
For reasons that I quite understand, Zelensky has repeatedly called for ‘face-to-face talks with Putin’. But I hope to God he doesn’t mean it literally. The Times reports today that Abramovich and two Ukrainian negotiators ‘developed symptoms consistent with chemical poisoning whilst staying in Kyiv after a day of negotiations’, and although U.S. intelligence thinks the cause was ‘environmental’, the statistical likelihood is that they were poisoned intentionally. I was told by Russian dissidents years ago that Putin was obsessed with poisoning. Remember Litvinenko, remember former Ukrainian president Yushchenko’s bloated face, the attempt to poison Politkovskaya, the poisoning of the Skripals, Navalny’s near-fatal poisoning… Putin and his people think poisoning is a great wheeze, terribly funny. (Recall the CCTV footage of his agents laughing in Salisbury after delivering novichok.) A British woman I know was interpreting at high-level talks with Putin, he took a dislike to her for particular reasons, and she could not appear in public for weeks afterwards as she came out in a dramatic rash. (The theory is that the chair she sat on at the Russian Embassy was impregnated with some virus like Pityriasis rosea.) If I were Volodymyr Zelensky I would never be in the same building as Putin, let alone the same room. And in any case: is it possible to meet the madman who is responsible for killing thousands of your own people and devastating your country? I certainly couldn’t do it. Putin doesn’t do negotiating, only dictating, and if Zelensky personally made a deal with him which was then rejected by the Ukrainian people in a referendum, Zelensky would surely have to resign, which would be a victory for Putin and disaster for Ukraine. Let Zelensky’s negotiators negotiate it, and Zelensky stay in his Kyiv office. He need ratify it only after it has been approved by the referendum.

31 March
Some people may think Zelensky and his team are weakening. First he told the world three weeks ago that ‘we have to accept we are not joining NATO’, and this week he has offered Russia ‘neutrality’ after a peace settlement. These are not symptoms of weakening, they are using reality for Ukraine’s purposes. Even before the Russians invaded, Ukraine was in a position where it ‘was not joining NATO’, because one of the terms for joining NATO is that a country should not be in a border dispute with any of its neighbours. But that is very different from ‘will never join NATO’, as no country can allow itself to be threatened, blackmailed, bullied and raped into declaring it will never do something. That would be for the democracy Ukraine to surrender unconditionally to the autocracy Russia.

Given that there is no immediate prospect of Ukraine qualifying to join NATO, Zelensky is right to offer Russia (and the West) neutrality. But he is demanding military guarantees of that neutrality from Russia and western powers. Here, again, he is absolutely right: it would be rectifying the shameful situation I referred to in the first paragraph of my previous post, when the West gave Ukraine ‘assurances’ of its security after brokering the nuclear demilitarization of Ukraine, but they were worthless, as they contained no deterrents (threats), and did not prevent this war.

However, I am afraid to say that neutrality guaranteed by Russia and western powers (the U.S., obviously, but the U.K., France and Germany have also been mentioned) would create the severest danger of a third world war to have emerged from the whole crisis, because it would create a situation analogous to Europe in 1914. Think: is Putin capable of being as mad as the Kaiser, dismissing the guarantees of western powers as ‘a scrap of paper’, and invading a neutral state? Yes, he is.

2 April
The West is still behaving as though Putin were ten foot tall. At the beginning of this war he made a bloodcurdling threat to use nuclear weapons if we interfered, he put his nuclear arsenal on a higher alert, and now he has sent nuclear submarines into the North Atlantic. Therefore, the general feeling is, we must not do anything that could possibly annoy him. Biden says Putin ‘cannot stay in power’ and the West’s diplomats howl that this is handing Putin ‘the propaganda narrative’. Forgive me, but you have handed Putin the narrative already. The man is not ten foot tall, he is a ranting psychopathic gambler like Hitler and his army a crime against humanity. It is time for us to get a grip like the Ukrainians and understand that we have nothing to fear but our own fear.

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

‘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

‘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.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged Alexander Litvinenko, Alexei Navalny, Anna Politkovskaya, Belgium, comments, fear, Iuliia Skripal, Joe Biden, Kaiser Wilhelm II, MiG fighters, peace negotiations, Pityriasis rosea, Roman Abramovich, Sergei Skripal, The Times, Tony Blair, Treaty of London, Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelensky, World War I | Leave a comment

Bruegel, reality and truth

Posted on March 30, 2022 by Patrick Miles

A man mourns his mother, killed by debris from a Russian missle in a Kiev street.
Fadel Senna/AFP/Getty Images/The Times

We all, I imagine, have photographs of terrible events (World War 1, say, the Holocaust, or Hiroshima) indelibly seared on our brains. Where Ukraine 2022 is concerned, the above is the one I shall never forget.

The face is straight out of Pieter Bruegel: the pain on it is so terrible that you cannot tell whether it is a man’s or an old woman’s face. The horror, to confront your own mother as a white blanket seeping blood, is itself dehumanizing.

My eyes prickle whenever I look at this image and I hesitated many times before posting it. But like the great Bruegel, we must face the terrors that hell on earth inflicts on us. ‘Human kind/Cannot bear very much reality’, Eliot wrote. Yet only by confronting reality fully, not ducking it, can we change it. We must always face it and fight on.

If you look longer at the man’s face and body you see also that they are contorted in the most extreme pity for his mother in death. More: his horror and his pity are the expression of his boundless love for his mother. This is not just a picture of the horror of deranged Putin’s war, it is an icon of the triumph of love.

Everywhere amongst the Ukrainian people on our screens, — amongst women, children, comrades — you see love, you see it driving them. Love always wins. That is the truth.

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

‘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

‘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.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged comments, death, Four Quartets, grief, Hiroshima, Kiev, love, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, reality, Russia, T.S. Eliot, The Holocaust, truth, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, World War I | 2 Comments

Only one subject…

Posted on March 23, 2022 by Patrick Miles

For the West, the most shameful part of the Ukrainian War is that if we had stood by the assurances of security that we gave Ukraine in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 after negotiating the transfer of its nuclear arsenal to the latter’s owner — Russia — this war would never have happened. Our fudged guarantee, which should have been based on THREATS, has proved worthless. No wonder Zelensky’s patience with us wears thin.

How could a guarantee have been given teeth? First, by threatening Russia with nuclear attack if Russia, having removed nuclear weapons from Ukraine, ever itself attacked Ukraine by any military means. Even Putin would have had to swallow this. Second, by negotiating a treaty with Ukraine to occupy its western half as Ukraine’s ally if Russia attacked Ukraine from the east, north or south. An attempt by Russia to take western Ukraine would therefore have involved war with NATO, which even Putin would have baulked at. Third, by having a plan well prepared to draft a large military force next to the border with Kaliningrad, say, and another next to the Polish border opposite Brest in Belorussia, immediately Russian troops crossed the Ukrainian border. That would have worried both the Russian and Belorussian dictators.

But there does not seem to have been any plan for swift NATO military action in the event of a Russian invasion of Ukraine aided by Belorussia. All the actions I have just described are THREATS, and we seem to have completely lost the ability to threaten — whereas Putin is a master at it, even if he is bluffing, and we cave straight in.

* * *

I have been speaking to a very clever old Russian woman who has lived in Britain most of her life. She regards the war as an utter tragedy for Russia, let alone Ukraine. She told me that she watches both the BBC and Russian television reports. They use identical images, she said, but they are ‘presented in diametrically opposed ways’: the pictures of the devastation of Mariupol, for example, or of children in hospital maimed by shrapnel, are presented by Russian television as the results of bombing by ‘the Ukrainian nationalists’. The cynicism of it defies belief. Russia has long suffered from two national diseases, however: paranoia and compulsive lying (vranë).

* * *

A letter last week in The Times suggested that if we informed the Russian people that Putin was going to be indicted at the International Court of Justice as a war criminal and taken there one day, it would encourage them to oppose him, depose him, and hand him over. Alas, no! Nothing would more certainly drive the Russian people to close ranks around ‘poor’ Putin; he would suddenly become another ‘victim of the West’… Russians are as intransigent about extraditing ‘their’ criminals as Americans are. Yet there can surely be no doubt that Putin is a war criminal, because he personally ordered this war. My grandfather, who went through the whole of the Great War, told me when I was about nine that the Kaiser ‘should have been hanged’. At the time, I couldn’t see why. Now I think that if the Kaiser had been tried at the Hague as a war criminal, found guilty and hanged, it might have deterred Hitler and the German people from the next war.

* * *

I was willing the Ukrainians to counterattack last week, after they had successfully stalled the Russian offensive around Kiev and other Ukrainian cities; and on 17 March the Ukrainians did, to great effect. But it must have put a severe strain on their forces and one wonders whether they can do it again. In a war of attrition, Russia would seem to be bound to win — but it did not in Afghanistan, remember. And Russia’s defeats in the Crimean War (1853-56), Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), Russo-Polish War (1919-20) and Afghan War (1979-89) triggered big changes. Again, it is difficult to see how Putin can survive.

* * *

Putin’s seizure of Crimea in 2014 was illegal, of course, but I do not see what right Ukraine has to it, either. Since 1783 Crimea had been part of the Russian Empire. It was transferred to the Ukrainian SSR only in 1954 by Nikita Khrushchev. I had always understood that he took this arbitrary-looking action purely to reward those Ukrainian Communists who had assisted him in his bloody purges when he was boss in Ukraine; who supported his post-Stalin bid for supreme power and kept their mouths shut about the atrocities he had committed on Stalin’s behalf. I personally believe, then, that Ukraine could reasonably recognise the ‘return’ of Crimea to Russia. Where the Donbas and Luhansk areas of eastern Ukraine are concerned, I do not know whether Russia has any more right to them than Hitler had to the Sudetenland, and would welcome someone explaining the facts of the matter in a Comment!

* * *

To anyone who lived in Russia under Communism, it is simply incredible that the West fooled itself about Putin for so long. He is a middle-ranking KGB man suffering from the typical psychiatric problems of his class: inferiority complex, paranoia, and megalomania. The first thing a KGB man said to you at an ‘interview’, every time, was: ‘We know everything about you.’ They did not. However, they themselves believed they did. That was the measure of their self-delusion. Their self-delusion was the most dangerous thing about them. And again, always trust the body language: on official occasions, Putin controlled his face and gestures, but when he addressed rallies of Nashi (the Putin-Jugend) his face started contorting with hate and aggression, he ‘lost it’ and ranted incoherently.

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

‘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

‘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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Adolf Hitler, Afghan War, Aleksandr Lukashenko, Belorussia, Brest, Budapest Memorandum, Crimean War, Donbas, International Court of Justice, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Kaliningrad, Luhansk, Mariupol, NATO, Nikita Khrushchev, paranoia, Russia, Russo-Japanese War, Stalin, Sudetenland, The Crimea, threats, Ukraine, Ukrainian SSR, Vladimir Putin, Volodomyr Zelensky, vranë, war criminals | 7 Comments

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 17

Posted on March 14, 2022 by Patrick Miles

24 January 2022
I have received several emails commiserating with me over my ‘anxiety’ and ‘nightmares’ about marking examination papers. The writers clearly assume I am Dr Robinson in my story Ghoune — that the story is strictly autobiographical and the flummery in it is what actually happens in Cambridge. An hilarious assumption! Actually I first typed out the flummery on a side of paper in 1976 for a colleague who was examining for the first time and certainly was anxious. My sketch was light-hearted and even he realised that the Impactor Librorum was a fantasy. He subsequently became an important archivist. During Black Crow I decided I should work the sketch up into one of my Cambridge Tales, so I asked him if he could send me a copy, but he could not find it.

29 January
Today we raise a glass to Anton Pavlovich on his 162nd birthday (actually today is his saint’s day, he was born on 16 (28) January 1860), and to the simultaneous publication of my shortish biography of him:

Click the cover to find the book on Amazon.

Sam2 and I are very pleased with Amazon’s printing of it, but for one thing: despite four Amazon proofs and all our efforts, they simply can’t get the page margins right or centre the title on the spine. That is to say, the bottom and top white spaces are consistent, but the side margins vary between 9 mm and 14.5 mm, therefore the ‘gutter’ in the middle of a two-page spread varies too. A variation of 5.5 mm in the side margins is far too much. How do they manage it? What on earth is the trouble?

To be fair, even the best printer in Britain, Clays of Bungay who printed George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, printed the book with far tighter left and right margins than we specified. As with Amazon, we were not consulted about this change and there was no way of correcting it. From a minute subcutaneous examination of Clays’ Terms and Conditions, I formed the suspicion that in reality there is 6 mm ‘tolerance’ in trimming the pages of a book. But why so much in the twenty-first century, when everything else is precisely programmed by the computer (e.g. the typesetting)? What is the problem? If anyone out there knows, please explain to us patiently in a Comment!

10 February
Andrew Tatham — himself the author of two highly innovative biographies — was quite right to suggest I should read A.J.A. Symons’s The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (1934). It is clearly the progenitor of all those biographies today that have ‘In Search of …’ in their title or subtitle. I can see, therefore, why the book reminded Andrew of my ‘Quest for George’, as he puts it. And like Symons’s, my biography ends by trying to evaluate ‘Who’ its subject ‘Was’.

But there are two vital differences. First, as Andrew says, ‘Corvo [Frederick Rolfe] was a much spikier and more socially awkward character than Calderon’. That is something of an understatement. The culmination of Symons’s ‘Quest’ is to discover that Rolfe was a vicious homosexual paedophile, and to interpret his whole life in terms of his need both to disguise that in Edwardian society and to indulge it. George Calderon could be deliberately elusive, but I can say with certainty that his life was not a pretence.

Second, as everyone agrees, the forensic narrative of how Symons pieced together Rolfe’s life is at least as interesting as Rolfe’s life itself; in fact it is the central continuous plot of the book, and in A.S. Byatt’s words ‘more enthralling than most novels’. Some readers have told me that the story of how I ‘discovered’ George and Kittie’s archive and pieced together their lives was ‘exciting’ and should have been foregrounded in my biography. But I could never, ever have done this, as it was a book entirely about George and Kittie’s lives, not mine. It is a common saying that a biography ‘tells you as much about its author as about its subject’, and it may be implicitly true (I too am a translator and director of Chekhov’s plays, a man of dubious success in the British theatre, a bloke whose life was deeply affected by his experience of Russia, etc), but that is very different from consciously turning a segment of your own life (the ‘Quest’) into your biography’s main narrative.

A remarkable testimony to the vitality of Symons’s method is Carole Angier’s 2021 Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald. Sebald is famous for his blend of fiction and non-fiction. Angier set out to investigate just how much of what Sebald presented as fact in his life and art was fiction, by tracing and interviewing those who knew him. Some of these, notably Sebald’s widow, refused to talk to her, which sharpens the suspense. But Angier shows that Sebald did play fast and loose with objective truth. She concludes:

If you read him without questioning, and are moved — that is his main aim. I remind you of the truth. That is the job of the biographer. (p. x)

This is all well and good, but inherent in the ‘personal quest’ method is an element of subjectivity, which can be destabilising. As an aesthete, dandy and epicure himself, and someone whose ‘inclinations have always exceeded my income’, Symons was prone to ‘understanding’ Rolfe’s excesses to the point of compromising his, Symons’s, objectivity — and in my view this happens. Of herself and Sebald, Augier writes:

Though the Holocaust was far from the only tragedy he perceived, it was his tragedy, as a German, the son of a father who had fought in Hitler’s army without question. It was also my tragedy, as the daughter of Viennese Jews who had barely escaped with their lives. I think it is right to see the Holocaust as central to his work. But if I make it too central, that is why. (p. viii)

You rarely encounter a biographer who warns you from the outset that they may be too subjective.

22 February
The invasion of Ukraine has begun from its eastern borders. It was incredible to me to hear the BBC’s correspondent sign off yesterday with the words ‘in Taganrog’. Taganrog on the Azov Sea is where Chekhov was born and he wisely got out of it as fast as he could. It was proverbial for its provinciality, hence the epigram on Alexander I: ‘Vsiu zhizn’ on byl v doroge,/A umer v Taganroge’ (‘He spent all his life travelling [Europe etc], yet died in Taganrog’). In the Soviet period it was not a tourist destination and visas were not issued to it. When I got there in 1970, the director of the Chekhov Museum told me that I was the first westerner they had ever seen and their last foreign visitor was a Hungarian in 1958.

The destruction of Ukraine’s liberty, sovereignty and democracy by military attacks, subversion, blackmail and political murder will now proceed according to all the rules laid down by Machiavelli. NATO and Ukraine are no military threat to Russia whatsoever, but Ukraine’s democracy is a dire threat to Putin. He loathes it. What would happen to him if Russians suddenly remembered what real democracy is and wanted it back? The only reason Putin needs the ‘buffer states’ of Belorussia and post-invasion Ukraine is to protect his own homicidal dictatorship and set Russia back seventy years.

27 February
One thing leads to another…

In January ‘Winterwatch’ featured a report of a Speckled Wood butterfly in a Cornwall garden. It sounded very unlikely, as this triple-brooded butterfly is generally seen April-October. Chris Packham commented that it was ‘possible, because it does hibernate’. The context implied that he meant ‘hibernate as a butterfly’. If he did, then most unusually for Packham he was wrong. The Speckled Wood is unique amongst British butterflies in overwintering both as a caterpillar and a chrysalis, which brings survival advantages and has helped its phenomenal spread northwards through Britain since the 1960s (it has even evolved stronger wing muscles in the process).

The January sighting, which turned out to be genuine, sent my mind back to the very first Speckled Wood that I caught as a boy. I remember it well, as I was out on a nature ramble in some woods with Juin, the adopted Dayak (Bornean) son of a local naturalist, and Juin had helpfully pointed out some areas of undergrowth that we should not go into as they had evil spirits in them. It was a clear day but I recall it being cold — late March. The butterfly fluttered out of some dark pines, I thought it was a moth, and netted it for a look (I did not collect moths). So Speckled Woods could be around earlier than April…

But not in this case! I opened up my old butterfly cabinet, and there it was:

The somewhat florid data label, which normally lives folded up and impaled on the pin beneath the butterfly, means: [Captured by] P.J.S. Miles [in] Betteshanger [Park, East Kent, the woods where Rupert Brooke did his military training in October 1914]; [The] 1st recorded sp[ecimen]. 18 April 1961. Not March, then… But the best-informed local entomologist confirmed that it was the first record for this part of Kent; presumably, this capture was early evidence of its future spread.

I saw other Speckled Wood butterflies in those woods, in dappled sunlight on warm summer and autumn days, but did not catch them, let alone kill them, as I was already aware, aged thirteen, how precarious butterfly populations were. Moreover, I was very into breeding butterflies from the egg. It was deeply satisfying to raise more actual butterflies (‘imagos’) from a brood than would have survived in nature, and I soon could not bring myself to kill them for my collection, so they were released. The local entomologist I referred to had a great collection, but by the time I knew him (1958) he had changed: he was becoming a convinced conservationist. Under his influence, I gave up collecting butterflies when I was fifteen and have been a butterfly conservationist ever since.

So where is this leading..? To this:

Why, sixty years ago, was it still acceptable for boys to collect, i.e. catch and kill, butterflies? (I never heard of girls doing it.) This is what I have frequently asked myself whenever I have attended to the preservation of my small collection from that time, which is now of historical environmental interest.

My answers at the moment would run like this:

(a) It wasn’t wholly acceptable. People of my parents’ generation (of whom the local entomologist above was one) were already doubting it, for both conservation and humane reasons.

(b) The generation above them did find it perfectly acceptable, and they were Late Victorians/ Edwardians. My grandfather, for example, born 1888, encouraged my collecting, two of his friends were serious Edwardian lepidopterists, and they actually passed on to me setting boards, pins, and fine Late Victorian/Edwardian books on the subject. As a boy, I was much more influenced by my grandfather than my father.

(c) It was still thought necessary to the scientific study of lepidoptera. You had to have the set specimen with data label to ‘prove’, say, the occurrence of a species. Paradoxically, perhaps, you had to have the dead specimen of an aberration or ‘variety’, to prove that it existed (i.e. had existed). The study of vast collections of butterflies led to the identification of new species and seasonal/regional forms; to a deeper understanding of butterfly genetics and evolution in action. Nearly all of this has been superseded by highly sophisticated live photography.

So a statement by Chris Packham has led me back to the Edwardians. The explosion of collecting and amateur scientific study of insects in that period is an interesting side to Edwardianism that I had not considered before. Natural history became even more popular, with some fine writers on the subject (e.g. W.H. Hudson of Hampstead, whom George Calderon knew). Women originated the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which received its charter from Edward VII.

I feel the urge to read my biography of Calderon from cover to cover again for the first time since 2018. There have been new books that are relevant and it would be interesting to discover to what extent I see things differently now. Watch this space, then, from about May onwards, for a return to some personal and guest posts about the Edwardians!

4 March
The invasion officially began on 24 February, but it was clear to some of us well before Christmas what the gameplan was, so there is no need for me to change a word of what I wrote in this diary on 22 February.

BUT: the utterly magnificent solidarity of the Ukrainian people has meant that every day by which they hold back the advance of Russian troops is a victory for Ukraine. According to intelligence reports, the delays have thrown Putin into Hitlerian rages.

Always trust the body language. The dictator’s ‘security council’ were plainly depressed, if not appalled, by the action he was asking them to ‘approve’, and his ‘economic advisers’ looked in total shock and despair. Neither group had known in advance what he was planning to do in Ukraine. Apparently, many govt officials wanted to resign, but were terrified he would accuse them of treason and put them in camps. I think there is a deep reluctance amongst the military, even. They have their own dignity. Implementing the historical fantasies of a murderer and war criminal may not be to their liking.

Where will it go from here? Unfortunately, the endgame will be pure Machiavelli as I said on 22 February. The occupation will be ruthless. People in the West will hardly be able to believe what the Russians perpetrate. We will weep tears of despair and frustration.

BUT: events have shown that the Ukrainian people love their liberty, sovereignty and democracy as their country — those, in addition to everything else, are what their country is for them — and they will never, ever resign themselves to losing them. Democracy is now a part of their identity, written in their blood and bones. At all costs, therefore, Zelensky and his brilliant team must escape and eventually form the government waiting in exile. If they don’t, I am sure Putin will kill them all. Obviously Putin wants to annex the whole country, but I have never believed he has the troops to do it and hold it. He may have to settle for the eastern half and grab the rest later — if he survives that long.

AND: Spot polls in Russia indicate that at most 3 out of 10 people support what Putin is doing. 150 Russian Orthodox clergy have signed a moving petition against it, even though, disgusting to relate, the Patriarchate approves of the invasion. The plotters will already be plotting, if only individually, since they realise that the only way to stop the economic and moral collapse of their country is to remove the psychopath. The Russian people made a terrible mistake twenty years ago in deciding that they had ‘done’ democracy and wanted a ‘strong man’. They were too lazy to make democracy work. Yet never underestimate the Russian people: as Pushkin wrote in similar circumstances, ‘Rossiia vsprianet oto sna’ (‘Russia will spring up from its sleep’). How long, though, will it take?

7 March
To my intense chagrin, Sam&Sam have had to cancel our participation in the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES) conference here in Cambridge 8-10 April. Sam1 in Moscow told me nearly four weeks ago that it was too risky for him to leave Russia, and I agreed. I was determined to man our stall with Jim. However, 85% of our books are in Russian and printed in Russia, so it is now too dangerous for Sam1, with his history of dissidence, to be seen to be associated with a western event whose organisers have publicly condemned the invasion. There was no alternative, then, but to pull out, and the President of BASEES emailed me: ‘I think it is the right decision.’ Moreover, certain ranting, Russophobic members of BASEES are planning to disrupt the conference and I don’t want to be either boycotted by them or harangued/interrogated by them. In the present climate, Sam&Sam would risk looking irrelevant. I fear the conference may not take place at all.

11 March
Some readers have asked me what George Sandison died from, and even whether he did die. Well, he certainly died, at the age of eighty-one, but I haven’t seen his death certificate so I can’t be definitive about the cause. He had had a very stressful day, of course, and it is well known that if you suffer from angina you should not suddenly raise your arms as it will put too much strain on the heart. Two of my relations died this way — one hanging up the washing, the other putting up a pelmet — not to mention other people I know of.

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

‘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

‘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.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Personal commentary | Tagged 'Ghoune', 'Sleep and Death', A.J.A. Symons, Alexander I, Amazon, Andrew Tatham, angina, Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov: A Short Life, archivists, Baron Corvo, BASEES, BASEES Conference, biographies, biography, birds, butterflies, Cambridge Tales, Carole Angier, Cheshire Cat, Chris Packham, Clays of Bungay, comments, conservation, death, democracy, examinations, Frederick Rolfe, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, George Sandison, heart attacks, Kittie Calderon, NATO, Niccolo Machiavelli, page margins, printers, RSPB, Sam&Sam, short stories, Speak, Speckled Wood, Taganrog, The Edwardians, The Holocaust, The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment iin Biography, trimming, typesetting, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, W.G. Sebald, W.H. Hudson, Winterwatch | Leave a comment

Cambridge Tales 4: ‘Sleep and Death’

Posted on February 28, 2022 by Patrick Miles

For Madeleine Descargues

Despite his gammy leg and stick, the College’s senior fellow succeeded in walking from King’s Cross to the hospital and arrived at the dying man’s bedside just after eleven a.m.

Two emeritus professors of French and one of Italian were already there. He nodded to them.

The Queen’s Professor of Spanish lay with a hand on the coverlet and his silver-bearded head jerked upwards to one side. A young nurse was attending to something attached to his other arm. Before anyone could say anything, a nurse in a darker uniform stopped at the foot of the bed and said:

‘Has he had his little visit, nurse?’

‘Yes,’ the first replied. ‘At six o’clock this morning.’

The senior fellow looked at his old colleagues and raised his eyebrows. When both nurses had gone, Byng, the Haberdashers Professor of French, said:

‘It’s an old wives tale. They believe that someone can’t die until they’ve been “visited” by a dead person they knew.’

‘Extraordinary,’ said the senior fellow. He pondered who, in this particular case, it might be. Sancho Panza?

He bent over the long, gaunt form of the Queen’s Professor, touched his hand, and whispered:

‘Jim, it’s Sandy here… George Sandison from Cambridge. I’ve come to say goodbye.’

There was absolutely no reaction.

‘He flickered his eyelids when we first arrived,’ said the Haberdashers Professor, ‘but nothing since.’

‘Hm…’ The senior fellow looked from face to face.

…Les parties blanches de barbes jusque-là entièrement noires rendaient mélancolique le paysage humain de cette matinée, comme les premières feuilles jaunes des arbres alors qu’on croyait encore pouvoir compter sur un long été…

Sandison had never been a professor, but his knowledge of Proust was encyclopaedic. He was very popular in his college, where he was also famous for having had a cat that had to be registered as ‘Dog’ to conform with the Statutes.

Between pauses, the four standing figures exchanged one-liners.

Suddenly a Bach harpsichord sonata, subdued and strangely Platonic, was extruded from some hidden source. They looked at each other, but another nurse appeared and began to draw the curtain round the bed.

‘We had better go,’ said the other Professor of French, and having each touched the Queen’s servant’s hand they went out into the corridor. There, the Professor of Italian said:

‘Well, gentlemen, I don’t know when we shall see each other again, in Paradiso I suppose!’

‘Yes, in Paradiso… In Paradiso!’ they agreed.

…toute mort est pour les autres une simplification d’existence…

The senior fellow hobbled back to King’s Cross and was in Cambridge well in time to attend his sixty-first college modern linguists graduand buffet.

It was a radiant May Week day, but too hot and steamy for him really, the exertions of the morning and the lunch were telling on him. He crossed the college lawn to the stone steps up to his rooms, but as he drew himself onto the first step he lurched and clipped his head on the wall. It was nothing, he would be all right once he got in and could subside into his reclining chair in front of the French window. First, however, he took a bottle of Meursault from the fridge and poured himself a large glass. He shuffled to the window, opened both leaves fully, and lay down.

Ah…how appropriate that simple Aligoté of Castor’s was with those superb slipper soles in aspic that the College did so well…perhaps he should not have had so many glasses of Chablis to follow, but soddit…and those young people were so lovely…their conversation was so fresh and invigorating…

He looked down at the river and across to the college gardens. The sunlight was brilliant, the river sparkled, and young people were punting slowly past there, like every summer he could remember. The university year was over again, quiet college life and Pimms parties would descend once more, even if that morning his bedder had jarringly reminded him that ‘the organs will soon be up’, meaning the candidates for organ scholarships… ‘The organs’! Dreadful woman, but it was still paradise, paradise…

He loosened his tie and sipped the chill Meursault. The Master’s Garden below was a vision of pink lavatera… The undergraduate at the back of that punt, complete with boater, had a cheeky little bum, and was full of grace…though nothing to compare with dear Adrian… ‘A young Apollo, golden-haired’ indeed… Les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdus… No no, not that ghastly quote again…

He heaved a deep sigh. Girls’ laughter and voices reached him from the river, but he drifted into a dazed sleep… Then he gradually became aware of someone looking at him from above the trees beyond the river. He opened his eyes and started.

‘It’s Ginger, my old cat!’

He threw his arms up towards the great feline head, and passed over.

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

‘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

‘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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged 'Sleep and Death', À la recherche du temps perdu, Aligoté, Apollo, Cambridge Tales, cats, Chablis, college life, Dante, death, Don Quixote, Frances Cornford, J.S. Bach, Marcel Proust, May Week, Meursault, paradise, Pimms, Plato, Professor of French, Professor of Italian, Professor of Spanish, professors, Rupert Brooke, Sancho Panza, wine | Leave a comment

Cambridge Tales 3: ‘Invisible Worm’

Posted on February 14, 2022 by Patrick Miles

For Damian Grant

The large auditorium was politely full – all those present were sitting about three feet apart. On the stage was a blackboard with a large flow chart hung on it, somewhat resembling the innards of an oil refinery.

The distinguished figure of Head of Faculty, in an immaculately ironed gown, was concluding his introduction of the guest speaker from the I.P. Onanovský Institute of Zoosemasiology, ‘famous throughout Central Europe’.

His guest, wearing a granular grey jacket and flamboyant open-necked white shirt, was rummaging in a battered brown attaché case on the floor. It evidently contained underclothes, several manuscripts, soap, a cucumber, and a hunk of black bread. But with a toss of his mane he produced the text he was looking for, slammed the case shut, and in two strides was at the podium.

‘…it is therefore my great pleasure to call upon Professor Lubomir Żuk to deliver the forty-fifth Hochstapler Memorial Lecture, entitled “Blake on White”.’

Żuk seized his script ravenously with both hands, jerked his head back, stared fiercely at the far wall, and was off. The little platinum blonde with enormous tortoiseshell glasses sitting in the middle of the front row immediately began writing.

‘It is known the animal symbolicum’s semeio-analysis of functional linguistic systems of poetic language – which we shall call PL for simplicity – contains the code of the logic linear. It postulates the isomorphism of paragrams. Further, we will expose in it all the combinatory figures that the algebra has formalised in a system of artificial signs and which are not externalised on the level of the manifestation of the usual language! In the functionment of the modes of conjunction of PL is comprised the dynamic process by which mechanism the signs are charged with, or themselves metamorphose, the signification. The phonologisation of these signs, articulated or not with a certain step of logoneurosis, is accompanied by distinct, we may say unique, situation-ness, and can only be comprehended hermeneutically (which we shall designate HER for simplicity).’

Not a muscle moved in the auditorium. You could have heard a pin drop. Żuk sharply inhaled and continued:

‘As Torop illuminated (1922, 1958, 1979), the semantics of the sub-system “literal description of strange world”, which we shall designate Φ (x₁…x_n) for simplicity, imply the polysemous transgradiency of diachronic antinomial tropes – ’

He bounded to the flow chart and stabbed a finger at various numbered black entrails. There was an audible shifting of posteriors and clearing of throats.

‘However, the constructional semantics of fictionality operating in the vectoralised empirical apparatus of fragments of PL suggest clustering and switching of codes and actional/axiological functions that correlate with the same “reality” but imply HER denotants through their inclusion as units (“words”) in an entirely different semiotic system, whose pragmatics are characterised by increased complexity of the semantic structure in consequence of interaction of extended series of distinct reticulatedness and transgraded valency within the given socium – ’

A solid block of tension had formed above the audience’s heads.

‘This we may observe in the fragmentary specimen of PL which I have chosen for dissection and shall now read.’

He bent over the text, cupped his hands round it as if it were a trembling butterfly, grinned toothily at it, and intoned:

O Rose, thou art sick…

Women screamed. Men roared. Several women flopped forwards onto their desks and the little blonde ejaculated ‘Crimson joy!’. Several men leapt up and stared about them as though lost. Some women burst into tears. Some men punched the air and one bellowed ‘Bless relaxes!’. Other women suddenly felt damp below. Three people were carried out unconscious. A student ululated hysterically, and an elderly professor fought his way into a gangway and throwing up his arms danced ecstatically out of the hall with cries of ‘Glad Day! Glad Day! Glad Day!’.

Żuk did not see. Wringing his hands slowly over the words, he continued:

The in-vis-ible worm –

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

‘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

‘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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged 'Glad Day', 'Invisible Worm', 'The Dance of Albion', 'The Sick Rose', Cambridge Tales, Central Europe, Damian Grant, Dullness, Hochstapler Lecture, Lubomir Żuk, pedantry, structuralism, William Blake, Zoosemasiology | 4 Comments

Cambridge Tales 2: ‘His Letter’

Posted on January 31, 2022 by Patrick Miles

He had had the honour of presiding at dessert, where he always drank the accepted minimum. He had entertained some of the guests with his account of the council estate on which he had grown up, and his bedder’s perennial inability to reposition objects correctly on his mantelpiece.

He returned to his rooms, hung up his gown, went straight to his desk still wearing his biscuity jacket and college tie, sat down, and pulled out a sheet of headed paper. He took from his breast pocket the black fountain pen he was given when he passed the 11-plus, unscrewed the top, and wrote:

Dear Master,

A case for restricting undergraduate guest hours can be made simply on sociological grounds, without reference to religious or moral scruples (which I hold, but do not argue here).

A residential community of scholars is not a microcosm of society. We of the Fellowship are all aware of the historical origins of the College in an ecclesiastical, contemplative and celibate way of life. Scholars have for centuries freely chosen to isolate and insulate themselves from the ‘world’ in order to concentrate all their energies and noetic powers on the gleaning of knowledge and pursuit of truth.

One implication of this is that over-mastering distractions, whether of thought or emotion, have to be shunned. In this respect it is a universal experience that most serious love-affairs during adolescence are destructive of serenity of mind. It is unnecessary, perhaps, to review the many contributory factors: infatuation, jealousy, fear of contagious disease, worry about chance pregnancies, exacerbated impecuniousness, psychosomatic penalties of violating a subconscious morality, etc. Even when an adolescent is constrained by conventional hindrances to such affairs, it is not easy to avoid distraction. It would be irresponsible (to say the least) for a College to remove a chief hindrance by providing comfortable facilities round-the-clock. It is significant that the proposal is being pressed by certain students whose tenor of mind is assuredly not the pursuit of learning, but is squalidly manifest in Rag magazines and the like.

That all-night stops scandalise College servants is generally acknowledged. It is signally to the credit of our lady bedmakers that hitherto none has communicated what she may have witnessed or suspected to a Sunday newspaper.

There are, I believe, two groups of persons to whose judgment the College must be especially alert. First, there are generations of members of the College who never enjoyed loose guest hours themselves, certainly do not approve of them now, and may well voice their disapprobation in the strongest of terms. Doubtless many will choose to withhold benefaction from an institution that sets at naught the authority of their experience and wisdom.

A second group consists of those young men who wish to respect the monastic tradition by reason of religious or moral convictions. Little sensitivity is needed to feel how intolerable they would find nightly proximity, on the same staircase or even in the same court, to proceedings they abhor. A College can not afford to sacrifice the allegiance of such men.

For these reasons alone I believe that guest hours at least as restrictive as those now obtaining should be rigidly enforced.

Yours very faithfully,

Alan Cook

He sat back and sighed. If that didn’t do it, he would resign. The College’s days were numbered.

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

‘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

‘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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged 'His Letter', Alan Cook, Cambridge Tales, college life, college servants, guest hours, sex, short story, students, The Fellowship, The Master, undergraduates | Leave a comment

Cambridge Tales 1: ‘Ghoune’

Posted on January 16, 2022 by Patrick Miles

It was a dark, diluvial, owl-infested night.

Despite the glass of Aquavit that he had downed at two in the morning after filling out, checking and re-checking his mark sheets, he tossed and turned in his bed. There was nothing he could do about it, it was the annual November nightmare.

‘Gratias Deo agamus pro collegio dilectissimo examinatorum…’

Aaaargh…they were processing in, led by the Impactor in black doublet and hose carrying the University Statutes… Turn over, turn over! Another glass of Aquavit…

Whoo-oo-er, whoo-oo-er, wobbled the owl in the tree outside his bedroom window, and was answered by several in the garden.

The chief examiners gathered round the original, six-hundred-year-old oak Board like rooks, or plague doctors, with their gowns – blast it, g-hounes – flapping and covering their hands. There was the abominable Professor ‘Zeus’ Griggs, who always nit-picked junior examiners’ marks…

‘Oculi omnium in vos respiciunt, docti…’

Oh God, were they? Was he sure he was wearing the right gown, the jet-black, sable-trimmed ghoune? (‘We pronounce the ‘h’ in it: g-houne, as they did in 1370.’) The right trousers? The right pants?

He tossed. The owls whoo-oo-ered. Rain lashed the window.

Was he absolutely, absolutely sure he’d got the marks right?

Riley, 25 and a half Composition, 28 Translation, 64 Literature…equals 117 and a half equals 58 and three quarters plus a half, a half, and another half…equals 60 and a quarter, check 12 and three eighths times 5…

And the blessed Hodgkinson, the weakest candidate but the first he’d marked, had he got that right, or had he marked too hard? He must check it…mo-der-ate…

Composition…a half, a half, a half (really?), a half, and a half (definitely), 18 and a half over 40 equals 9 and a quarter times five equals 46 and a quarter…

Fortunately, the real warfare was conducted in English:

‘And now I call upon Dr Robinson to present the marks for the Entrance candidates in Swedish…’

Aaaargh, his opening response still had to be in Latin! Was the text of it firmly stuck inside his mortarboard, was it legible enough, and could he doff the absurd hat and hold it at quite the right angle for no-one to see he was reading from it?

…19 over 40 equals 9 and a half times five equals 47 and a half per cent 23 and three quarters call it 24 over 50…

Aaaaargh! Griggs was interrupting him, peering over his half-moon glasses…

…13 and a half over 40 equals 6 and three-quarters re-check…23 and three-quarters equals 24 over 50 plus 34 over 2, minus a half, a half, a half…

Whoo-oo-er, whoo-oo-er…lash-lash…g-houne…g-houl…goon…

At about four in the morning, the business was concluded. ‘Zeus’ approved his final adjusted marks with a slow, savoury ‘Benedictum’, whereupon all the other rooks round the table cawed:

‘Satis habemus in rationibus doctoris Robinsoni – impinge ei, lictore!’

The great moment of release had come.

He bowed over his examiner’s desk. The Impactor Librorum strode round, stood before him, lifted the tome with both hands, and brought it down on his head…

A sheet of blackness engulfed him, like a billowing ghoune.

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

‘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

‘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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged 'Ghoune', Academe, Aquavit, Cambridge Tales, Entrance to Cambridge University, examinations, Impactor Librorum, Latin, mortarboards, nightmares, November, owls, Robinson, Swedish language, Zeus Griggs | 2 Comments

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 16

Posted on January 6, 2022 by Patrick Miles

17 November 2021
Today at 9.54 a.m. I emailed my 408-line poem Making Icons to the excellent Long Poem Magazine, the only organ in Britain that publishes poems at least 75 lines long. The magazine appears twice a year and November is the submission window for the Spring issue. After taking twelve years to write the poem, I suppose I should not be surprised that I spent almost a week getting it into the exact format needed for submission, with a short preamble and detailed notes, and that the whole process was rather emotional.

Frankly, I don’t expect them to take it, as it’s too ‘forthright’ for the younger modern taste. In consideration of that, I suggested that the words ‘tear off your Tar-Baby’ in stanza 4, line 11, could be replaced by ‘tear through your thornbush’ (I trust the reason is clear). I found the required preamble (113 words) took almost as much effort to write as a stanza of the poem, and thought it wise to begin with: ‘This is not a religious poem.’

26 November
The ‘late’ chrysanths in the garden are coming to an end, to be replaced next month by Christmas-flowering ones, but there are still enough to help fill a vase…

The spotted laurel leaves come from a seven-foot high bush that I grew from a cutting I was given in 1970 by the warden of Chekhov’s house in Yalta from a laurel planted in the garden by the great man himself.

3 December
I am reading the third set of proofs of my Anton Chekhov: A Short Life, which Sam&Sam are publishing at the end of next month. As I read, I stop to check facts for which I can’t remember the source off the top of my head (I wrote the first edition, published by Hesperus Press, in 2007). I’m glad to say there aren’t many such, but this afternoon I had to verify my statement in chapter 11, ‘Chekhov, Anti-Semitism, and Democracy’, that ‘It was probably between 1897 and 1899 that the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion were fabricated in France by the Tsarist secret police, with incalculable consequences for Russian and European Jews in the twentieth century’. I knew that there is a recent school of thought that the Russian secret police (Okhranka) was not involved in the fabrication. However, after consulting Sam1’s Russian translation of Norman Cohn’s Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Scholars Press, 1981) I concluded as before that the Okhranka was.

On page 117 my eye was caught by Hitler’s statement (1924) that ‘Jesus was not, of course, a Jew, but an Aryan’. A bell rang. At the Third International Congress for the History of Religions, held at Oxford in September 1908, a German professor read a ‘sensational’ paper ‘The Ethnology of Galilee; or, Was Jesus a Jew by race?’. Clearly, in restrospect this was part of the campaign of anti-semitism that gathered head across Europe following the Dreyfus Affair and helped make Nazism possible. For some reason, I felt a flush of ‘pride’ in George Calderon, when I recalled that he stood up after the German paper and according to the Manchester Guardian stated that ‘there was no Aryan race, and Jesus was undoubtedly a Jew by religion and nationality’.

15 December
Today calls for a double celebration! Jim (Sam2) brilliantly completes my series of posts on Japan — from the point of view of someone who has actually lived there — and we have met our deadline of submitting the text and cover of Anton Chekhov: A Short Life to Amazon. We might receive the first proof from Amazon by Christmas, but I doubt it. It won’t matter, because there should still be plenty of time to receive two proofs in the New Year and get the book out there by publication day, 29 January, Chekhov’s birthday. Here’s a preview of the back cover:

Click to enlarge.

21 December
‘Getting in the holy and the ivy’. I am clearing the bottom of the garden in order to sow it with the mixture of grasses that the caterpillars of the Speckled Wood, Hedge Brown, Meadow Brown and Ringlet butterflies feed on. They have bred in other, small areas of wild grass in the garden, but need encouraging. This project enables me to cut back a large branch of ivy for decorating the house together with sprigs from a holly:

We live in what a postgraduate student of mine called ‘suburbia’, twenty minutes walk from the centre of Cambridge, yet holly and ivy can spring up here in any part of the garden if you leave it long enough. It’s almost mysterious. As though the quintessentials of a medieval English Christmas will always reassert themselves. With the inevitable robin, of course — where does that bird always spring from?

6 January 2022
Twelfth Night, as we reckon it at least. It always feels more definitely the end of a year than 31 December itself. Not only do I now resume the years-long quest through Lent to reduce my weight to a healthier 12 stone, but we have completed a Kon-Tiki of projects and there is to be a real break.

First, Sam&Sam will be publishing no more books for at least a year. (By 29 January we shall have published two in seven months.) I shall be concentrating on marketing and selling all our English- and Russian-language books.

As part of that, between now and the end of March I shall be working on the preparations for our appearance at the annual conference of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES) 8-10 April at Robinson College, Cambridge. There’s not really any way of telling, but I hope we shall sell a lot of books, and especially copies of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius at the reduced price for delegates of £20.

I am also trying something new on the blog. Between 15 January and 14 March I shall be posting four ‘Cambridge Tales’. They come from the book of twenty short stories I am working on (slowly) at the moment, to be entitled Ghoune/White Bow. I don’t think it would be reasonable to post any story longer than about five pages. After the Conference, I shall probably post another four. They all derive from notes and drafts from the late 1970s/early 1980s…but most were only ‘written down’ last year, thanks to Black Crow. I shall be interested in any response. It will be rapidly apparent that they are set in an academic world that has gone forever; but I don’t think the essence has changed.

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

‘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

‘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.