THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING! THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING!!

'TIL I GAIN CONTROL AGAIN

I must admit that all my life I have felt a strange affinity with Russian writers. I discovered Tolstoy somehow in my 13th summer.
Someone  dared me to read  the entire WAR AND PEACE.  I  guess I was such a braggart about my reading that I brought that kind of challenge out of them.

 But once I got started I could not stop. I had never known the way that  a writer like Tolstoy makes you feel when he brings you into another time and place. I can still recall feeling jolted when I would close the book and was startled to find I was  still in Pawtucket. It would take me a minute or more to adjust to the change of time and place and character.
 I loved Tolstoy so much and went onto Anna Karenina, a novel that  rocked my soul and which  I craved so much that for many years afterwards I read it again every summer. Each time I hoped that the ending would be different. I hated the fact that Anna  jumped in front of that train.
 I went from Tolstoy to Dostoyevsky and  I was amazed by the way he presented debate and argument in a novel. I was completely surprised by the character of Prince Myshkin in THE IDIOT.
Here is a character that is so good and the world does not know what to do with him.  He echoes to me Patrick Pearse's Irish understanding of  both the wickedness of the world and the perfection of Jesus.They become types of Holy Fools like Don Quixote --those who take Christ at his Word.
MOST TAKE HIM WITH A GRAIN OF SALT. Like that rich young man who went away sad when Jesus advised him to see all he had and give to the poor and follow HIM.
Such  spiritual aspirations linked to such a profoundly  negative sense of the wickedness of the world  display the deep current that flows between the Russian and Irish cultures and links their souls.
Even Yeats had to  admit it in his poem  about the Easter Rising:

And what if excess of love   

Bewildered them till they died?   

I write it out in a verse—

MacDonagh and MacBride   

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:   

A terrible beauty is born.

My love for the Russian soul and their shared sense of the terrible beauty that  human sacrifice brings to the world  was sealed when 
I finally met Chekhov--that was in college. 

I still cannot  read or hear the final speech by Sonya without  feeling the devastation. When I saw Uncle Vanya on Broadway with Julie Christie and George C. Scott I could not leave the theater for  a half hour after the final curtain :

SONYA: What can we do? We must live out our lives. [A pause] Yes, we shall live, Uncle Vanya. We shall live all through the endless procession of days ahead of us, and through the long evenings. We shall bear patiently the burdens that fate imposes on us. We shall work without rest for others, both now and when we are old. And when our final hour comes, we shall meet it humbly, and there beyond the grave, we shall say that we have known suffering and tears, that our life was bitter. And God will pity us. Ah, then, dear, dear Uncle, we shall enter on a bright and beautiful life. We shall rejoice and look back upon our grief here. A tender smile -- and -- we shall rest. I have faith, Uncle, fervent, passionate faith. We shall rest. We shall rest. We shall hear the angels. We shall see heaven shining like a jewel. We shall see evil and all our pain disappear in the great pity that shall enfold the world. Our life will be as peaceful and gentle and sweet as a caress. I have faith; I have faith. [Wiping away her tears] My poor, poor Uncle Vanya, you are crying! [Weeping] You have never known what it is to be happy, but wait, Uncle Vanya, wait! We shall rest. We shall rest. We shall rest.
Read more at http://www.monologuearchive.com/c/chekhov_010.html#MFJTACdy4zR6RKT1.99
  
There is something so contrary about the Russsian soul. Like those that Synge celebrates in his tragedy RIDERS TO THE SEA  It does not deny the reality and it does not hate life--it endures all,

The poet Lermontov captures the impulse in both the Russian and Irish heroes to seek the tempest and to run towards the fight--not away,

A single sail is bleaching brightly
Upon the waves caressing hand,
What seeks it in a stranger country?
Why did it leave its native strand?
When winds pipe high, loud roar the billows
And with a crashing bends the mast,
It does not shun its luckless fortune,
Nor haste to port before the blast.
To-day the sea is clear as azure,
The sun shines gaily, faint the wind--
But it revolting, looks for tempest,
And dreams in storms its peace to find!
Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov

 I did not forget the great Russian poets like Mayakovsky and  Yevtuschenko. or the brilliant work of Anna Akhmatova. She asks  a question that many of us are asking these days and maybe all older people ask who have felt out of touch with the  new times and generation--

Why Is This Age Worse...?

Why is this age worse than earlier ages?

In a stupor of grief and dread

have we not fingered the foulest wounds

and left them unhealed by our hands?

In the west the falling light still glows,

and the clustered housetops glitter in the sun,

but here Death is already chalking the doors with crosses,

and calling the ravens, and the ravens are flying in.

Translated by Stanley Kunitz (with Max Hayward)

In a  detailed interview  in The Paris Review, Yevtuschenko strikes a similar note and theme:

Alas, I myself belong to a less exalted poetic tradition. My verse is usually dictated by contemporary events, by sudden emotions—but such is the nature of my talent … when I am deeply moved, I am prompted to pour my feelings out at once in verse.” As he spoke, Yevtushenko got up, moved around the room, sat in turn in every one of various overstuffed armchairs, settling eventually on the dark-blue velvet settee, his long legs, crossed, stretched far into the room. But soon he stood up again to recite a poem of his own, one of several dedicated to Mayakovsky:  

What is it destroyed Mayakovsky,

Put a revolver in his hand?

To him with his great voice, his nobility,

If only there had been offered some tenderness.

—Living people are such a nuisance

Tenderness is for those safely dead.

The idea of the "safely dead: certainly haunts the Irish soul as well. I see a strange  and deep connection . So many  people in Irish and Russian history that are vilified when they are  alive and causing controversy are deeply revered and celebrated when they are "safely dead."

CASE IN POINT-------BOBBY SANDS, MP.