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.

Dude, you want me to explain the difference between an orgasm and an attack of asthma. It’s impossible but I’ll try.

Read the following lines. Breathe them in, inhabit them, say them slowly out loud:

Словно тёмную воду, я пью помутившийся воздух.
Время вспахано плугом, и роза землёю была.
В медленном водовороте тяжёлые нежные розы,
Розы тяжесть и нежность в двойные венки заплела!

I mean, talking about orgasm. This is what “в медленном водовороте” is transmitting without remotely naming it. Just say it aloud: “В медленном водовороте тяжёлые нежные розы”. Right? People who don’t know a word of Russian break out in sweat when I recite it. Not a single time did anybody fail to figure out from recitation alone that it’s an erotic poem that has zero words of eroticism. It’s in the meter, in the way words are arranged. You’ll have to draw in breath to be able to say “в медленном водовороте”. So the poem has you gasping whether you want to or not. The poet is stepping out of the verse and making you do things in reality by the power of his craft. He’s been dead for going on a century and he still is present in our very breath.

Or this:

И море, и Гомер — всё движется любовью.
Кого же слушать мне? И вот Гомер молчит,
И море черное, витийствуя, шумит
И с тяжким грохотом подходит к изголовью.

If you can’t hear the sea waves crashing against the bedpost in the last verse, then I give up.

And now let’s look at the poem that cost Mandelshtam his life:

Его толстые пальцы, как черви, жирны,
А слова, как пудовые гири, верны,
Тараканьи смеются усища,
И сияют его голенища.

Primitive rhymes, shallow imagery, childish vocabulary. “Жирны-верны” is out there with “розы-морозы”. It’s an insult to poetry. “Усища” is child speak.

To remove the aftertaste from this bleh poem, one more quote from Mandelshtam’s real poetry:

Кто время целовал в измученное темя, —
С сыновьей нежностью потом
Он будет вспоминать, как спать ложилось время
В сугроб пшеничный за окном.

You can spend the rest of your life feeding on the beauty of these lines and still gasp for air, crushed by the weight of their meaning. I think about these lines often. They have changed the very fabric of who I am.

Russia’s population dropped by at least 3,6 million people since 2020. The drop is overwhelmingly in the ethnically Russian regions.

It’s a national suicide, eagerly embraced by its population. Praising Russia as a model of anything except suicidal behavior is not grounded in facts.

Stalin personally protected Pasternak from persecution. People around him, including his mistress, were arrested but the writer himself wasn’t touched. None of the great Russian writers were hurt in any way during Stalinism. The only exception was Osip Mandelshtam. Jewish like Pasternak, he had an even greater poetic gift. The only untalented poem he ever wrote made vicious fun of Stalin’s physical appearance. As a result, Mandelshtam died in the camps.

Other than that, Stalin made no attempt to destroy the Russian literature. Even the great Russian modernists survived when modernism was banned.

Almost all of the Ukrainian writers, on the other hand, were executed during the Stalinist era. Stalin was a true Russian nationalist in spite of not being Russian and not speaking the language well. It happens.

I have no idea why there are men who enjoy siccing the wife and the mistress at each other and living between two harpies tearing them into pieces. The genius poet Boris Pasternak was one such man. God gave him an extraordinary talent but nothing whatsoever by way of a conscience or morals, and no matter how much his distant descendant Ann Pasternak tries to whitewash his tawdriness in Lara, she’s not very successful.

Lara tells the story of Olga Ivitskaya, Pasternak’s long-time mistress. The author of Lara for some reason concluded that Olga was the inspiration behind the main character of Doctor Zhivago whose name was Lara, hence the title of the book. This makes no sense because Boris Pasternak started writing the novel before meeting Olga and the most distinguishing fact about the otherwise insipid character of Lara – which is that she was a victim of a pedophile – is based on Pasternak’s wife Zinaida on whom he was cheating with Olga. Of course, Zinaida had broken up her own marriage with Pasternak’s best friend as well as the poet’s marriage to another woman in order to become the wife, so it’s not like she wasn’t complicit in creating this whole mess of a love triangle.

Like some sort of a Mexican bureaucrat, the poet made the wife and the mistress live in close proximity to each other. He spent all day trudging from the Big House where the wife lived to the Little House that was the abode of the mistress. The children of everybody involved had to observe the ongoing melodrama for years.

Olga was one of those despicable women who abandon their children the second a fresh pair of trousers appears on the horizon. She explained to her very young kids that her personal life took precedence over them and turned them into a supporting cast for her decades-long fruitless attempts to get the famous writer to dump his wife and marry her. Pasternak didn’t reward her efforts but the Soviet government did, sending Olga to the GULAG twice. One wouldn’t even mind given how horrible this woman was but the tragedy of the situation is that Ivitskaya’s miserable daughter from another relationship was sent to the camps, too.

I absolutely have a double standard for geniuses. I’d never excuse pedophilia or murder but everything else pales in importance compared to producing great art. Humans do a lot of shitty stuff, both individually and collectively. But what redeems humanity is the creation of beauty. For reasons we cannot comprehend, God chose Pasternak to be one of the conduits of beauty he sends to edify and console us. Pasternak was a good conduit, working very hard on bringing this gift to the people. I believe that this excuses his moral nastiness and I also believe that neither Zinaida nor Olga have such an excuse. Please understand that it isn’t their sexual immorality that makes me say these women were vicious harpies from hell. That I don’t care about because they were all equally shit in that situation. If these women were childless, I wouldn’t say a word. They weren’t, though. They sacrificed their children most eagerly to feed their own need to be known as wives (or pseudo wives) of a famous man. That’s shitty and inexcusable. Pasternak was also a crap father, which is equally shit and inexcusable. But at least he created art, and these women created nothing except squabbling.

It’s a nice book, well-written, even though it’s seriously Putinoid in its mood. Pasternak is British and you can’t expect her to know when she’s reciting Putinoid propaganda.

Friends, this is too funny. Turns out the CIA was always a useless bunch of fools:

‘[The novel Dr Zhivago] has great propaganda value, not only for its intrinsic message and thought-provoking nature, but also for the circumstances of its publication,’ declared a memo to all the branch chiefs of the CIA Soviet Russia Division; ‘we have the opportunity to make Soviet citizens wonder what is wrong with their government, when a fine literary work by a man acknowledged to be the greatest living Russian writer is not even available in his own country in his own language for his own people to read.’

Lara, Anna Pasternak

I’ll never stop laughing, somebody help.

I always wondered why a clumsy, trite novel like Doctor Zhivago merited its author the Nobel Prize. Boris Pasternak is a genius poet. Extraordinary, absolutely incredible. But his novel is saccharine, melodramatic crap.

Well, guess what? Finally, I found out. The CIA made huge efforts to get him the Nobel Prize because they thought the novel could be used to discredit pro-Soviet feelings around the world.

I’m so glad to have found out because it really bothered me.

P.S. Vladimir Nabokov also thought it was a bad novel. I literally never managed to finish it because it’s boring. Chocolate-covered snot.

20 minutes on foot, 20 minutes on a tram, 10 more minutes on foot. Massive opportunities to get off course and end up somewhere else. Good times.

Translation: you are too short and unattractive.

Advice: asking people why they don’t want to date you is stupid. You can’t “work on” a certain person not finding you attractive. She’s just not that into you, that’s all. And given how verbose she is, that’s clearly a blessing. Imagine receiving these sheets of text 20 times a day.

I’m sorry, friend, but what can I do? If I remove the registration requirements, we immediately get 15 anonymouses who refuse to sign a name and end up confusing everybody with who is speaking to whom.

Since I’m at it, people who left for ideological reasons, please come back. I won’t do the “I told you so” thing. I never do it because it’s boring. I respect and support changing your mind. God knows, I do a lot of it myself.