The person who made me write a long post about poetry in Russian that nobody else understands could at least leave a comment so that it’s less lonely.
Seriously, folks should be more considerate to posts and their feelings.
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Opinions, art, debate
Clarissa's Blog 
I’m sorry, that isn’t very considerate.
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I wish it had been me, but alas it wasn’t.
Mandel’shtam is my favourite Russian poet (“de toda la vida”) and of course his mockery of Stalin in verse was just a form of venting, which he paid for with his life. Such a loss for art and the world, but then we wouldn’t have the poems of the Voronezh notebooks. The tragedy of Mandel’shtam’s life is also the triumph of his art.
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He was my father’s favorite poet. An extraordinary talent. I’d say on the level of Francisco de Quevedo, my other favorite poet. Probably I’d rank Quevedo just a bit higher because he’s a lot more depressing. I had to stop teaching him because I can’t recite his poetry without crying. That’s how deeply it touches me. But students get scared, so I don’t do it.
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I don’t know shit about Russian. But I’ve visited St Petersburg and before that I played with Duolingo for a couple of months. Years later, I can remember most of the Cyrillic alphabet and maybe 50 basic words. And when I mouth these fragments, they’re poetry. Without looking at any translation, they’re poetry. You feel it in your throat, and between your legs.
Perhaps I should give Quevedo a try. Don’t speak any Spanish but it’s much closer to my native tongue than Russian.
Might not the banality of Mandelstam’s Stalin poem have been intentional, though? Again,I speak no Russian. I’ve just glanced at a translation and whispered the original aloud straight from Cyrillic. And it’s all so fucking wooden it feels stifling. Like swallowing rocks. This has got to be intentional, if I tell chatgpt to write something random in Russian I won’t feel like puking 3 lines in. It takes work to create something this revolting.
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Personally I feel it’s very hard to kill someone over a bad poem.
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It goes without saying that Stalin was a genocidal maniac. I’m not justifying him or anything. A total bastard.
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This is poetry, definitely. Great, great poetry. I’ll never get over how beautiful it is. And of course, it’s impossible to get inspired to write something beautiful about Stalin. Many people sincerely tried, and it always came out wooden and ugly. Just like the subject himself.
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Can’t dictate people’s responses. They’re so unpredictable.
Occasionally, I’ll get a bee in my bonnet– something somebody said, that sets off a chain of uncomfortable associations, which I then sit down and write about, to find out what I am thinking. If it’s not too bad, I’ll post it in the internet, hoping that someone else will have thoughts about this thing, that will help me nail down that last little bit, that still buzzes in my head.
It never happens.
The last one I posted got the worst possible response: people *liked* it, said what a great *piece of writing* it was, and completely failed to engage with the topic.
Fail.
Fail fail fail.
I just wanted somebody to explain why I was *wrong* or tell a story about the *opposite* thing so the world would be a nicer place than I thought it was.
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