The bombing of Babyn/Babi Yar

The name has horrific connotations for all of us. Yesterday Russian forces hit not only Kyiv's TV tower but also the memorial which hadn't been constructed at the time Yevtushenko wrote his famous poem, marking the Nazi massacre at the ravine outside the Ukrainian capital. Four people visiting it were killed. I found on YouTube film of a performance of Shostakovich's Thirteenth Symphony, setting this and other Yevtushenko poems I didn't know had taken place - conducted by Thomas Sanderling, Russian-born son of Kurt, on the very site last October, to mark the 80th anniversary of the atrocity. As there are no subtitles, here's a translation of the poem by Benjamin Okopnik. Here's a link to the website where I found his translation. Certain horrible ironies resonate there now.

No monument stands over Babi Yar.
A steep cliff only, like the rudest headstone.
I am afraid.
Today, I am as old
As the entire Jewish race itself.

I see myself an ancient Israelite.
I wander o’er the roads of ancient Egypt
And here, upon the cross, I perish, tortured
And even now, I bear the marks of nails.

It seems to me that Dreyfus is myself.
The Philistines betrayed me – and now judge.
I’m in a cage. Surrounded and trapped,
I’m persecuted, spat on, slandered, and
The dainty dollies in their Brussels frills
Squeal, as they stab umbrellas at my face.

I see myself a boy in Belostok
Blood spills, and runs upon the floors,
The chiefs of bar and pub rage unimpeded
And reek of vodka and of onion, half and half.

I’m thrown back by a boot, I have no strength left,
In vain I beg the rabble of pogrom,
To jeers of “Kill the Jews, and save our Russia!”
My mother’s being beaten by a clerk.

O, Russia of my heart, I know that you
Are international, by inner nature.
But often those whose hands are steeped in filth
Abused your purest name, in name of hatred.

I know the kindness of my native land.
How vile, that without the slightest quiver
The antisemites have proclaimed themselves
The “Union of the Russian People!”

It seems to me that I am Anna Frank,
Transparent, as the thinnest branch in April,
And I’m in love, and have no need of phrases,
But only that we gaze into each other’s eyes.
How little one can see, or even sense!
Leaves are forbidden, so is sky,
But much is still allowed – very gently
In darkened rooms each other to embrace.

-“They come!”

-“No, fear not – those are sounds
Of spring itself. She’s coming soon.
Quickly, your lips!”

-“They break the door!”

-“No, river ice is breaking…”

Wild grasses rustle over Babi Yar,
The trees look sternly, as if passing judgement.
Here, silently, all screams, and, hat in hand,
I feel my hair changing shade to gray.

And I myself, like one long soundless scream
Above the thousands of thousands interred,
I’m every old man executed here,
As I am every child murdered here.

No fiber of my body will forget this.
May “Internationale” thunder and ring
When, for all time, is buried and forgotten
The last of antisemites on this earth.

There is no Jewish blood that’s blood of mine,
But, hated with a passion that’s corrosive
Am I by antisemites like a Jew.
And that is why I call myself a Russian!

And here's heroic President Zelenskyy's reaction yesterday:

Sylvia, Sylvia

No, not the catchphrase demand (actually three 'Sylvia's) for diva Bills of La Gran Scena opera company, but a salute to two masterly novels by one of the most singular of all writers, Sylvia Townsend Warner. She seems to me something of a forerunner of the fabulous Hilary Mantel in her imaginative approach to historical truth; to find out more I'd have to read Summer Will Show, about the 1848 Paris uprising - next on the list - as soon as I can following After the Death of Don Juan.

But I started with what, for 1926, was contemporary subject-matter, thanks to a pointer from Richard Mabey in Beechcombings, his characteristically free-range book on British trees. The second half of Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes is set in Mabey's stamping-ground of the beech-rich Chilterns. It's the subdued spinster's sudden dash for freedom after twenty years in the suffocating household of her brother and sister-in-law. Longing after 'a something that was shadowy and menacing, and yet in some way congenial', she's struck by the beech sprays in a bouquet put together by a London florist: 'they smelt of woods, of dark rustling woods like the wood to whose edge she came so often in the country of her autumn imagination'.


So off goes Laura - no longer diminished to 'Aunt Lolly' - to Great Mop. Her only seeming ally, dilettantish nephew Titus, turns out to be a disappointment in the new environment. His 'deep Willowes love for country sites and smells...was different in kind from hers'.

It was comfortable, it was portable, it was a reasonable appreciative appetite, a possessive and masculine love. It almost estranged her from Great Mop that he should be able to love it so well, and express his love so easily. He loved the countryside as though it were a body.

She had not loved it so. For days at a time she had been unconscious of its outward aspect, for long before she saw it she had loved it and blessed it. With no earnest but a name, a few lines and letters on a map, and a spray of beech-leaves, she had trusted the place and staked everything on her trust.

She retreats, if that's the right word,deeper into her own personal mystery, finding the local witches' sabbath and even Satan himself, who gets the big speech about woman's independence, 'very probably...quite stupid.' Even if she's sold her soul, she has her vision.


Far more pragmatic, and pungent in quite a different way, is Townsend Warner's riff on life after the supposed damnation of Mozart's and Moliere's Don Juan/Giovanni. The extra dimension here is her experience of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Dona Ana and her Ottavio seem to Juan's father, the well-meaning Don Saturno, a 'pair of elegant waxworks, one of which had a mechanism enabling her to sing as eloquently as a canary, the other incapable of saying more than Papa and Mamma'. In fact both prove more dangerous as forerunners of Fascist allies.

Townsend Warner's love of Spain is palpable in the most eloquent descriptions of sunrises and sunsets, equal to the many human sketches. The scene where she takes us inside Don Saturno's mind as he works on his Aristophanes translations is consummate, and his fate haunts the reader. The peasants are never idealised, but their bleak tenacity is mirrored in the prose. Townsend Warner describes the most admirable character, Ramon, as 'a man of certain steadfast ideas - not uncommon in that, and the ideas were nothing out of the ordinary. What made his peculiar was the steadfastness by which he lived out his creed.'

Which leads me to inflict on you a typically blunt poem on a similar theme by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whose writings I revisited while preparing 'Babi Yar' for the Passenger class at the City Lit.


The photo is by Cybersky from 2009, a couple of years after I heard Yevtushenko read 'Babi Yar' before a performance of Shostakovich's Thirteenth Symphony in Carnegie Hall (the near-monotonous delivery struck western ears very strangely). And here is George Reavey's translation of 'Conversation with an American Writer', written in 1961. Forgive me if this system doesn't permit me to space as the poet does.

'You have courage', they tell me.
It's not true. I was never courageous.
I simply felt it unbecoming
to stoop to the cowardice of my colleagues.

I've shaken no foundations,
I simply mocked at pretense and inflation.
Wrote articles. Scribbled no denunciations.
And tried to speak all on my mind.

Yes, I defended men of talent,
branding the hacks, the would-be writers.
But this, in general, we should always do;
and yet they keep stressing my courage.

Oh, our descendants will burn with bitter shame
to remember, when punishing vile acts,
that most peculiar time, when
plain honesty was labelled 'courage'.

Now back to STW - to read more of her novels, and find out more about her extraordinary life: her political convictions and her long-term relationship with poet Valentine Ackland which made her one of the National Portrait Gallery's recent 'Gay Icons'. The style, though, is the thing, and in that only Mantel can touch her.

Fear

It might not look to you the way Paul Klee portrays it above, but we've surely all known a little of it over the past few days. Will the riots come to my part of London? Should I bolt the door, shut the windows to block out the sound of sirens? Something, of course, I was much more inclined to do after watching late-night news on Monday evening.

The reality, of course, was different: reality is rarely, in our privileged world at least, quite as bad as you fear. Unless, of course, you've lost someone to violence or had your house burned down by irrational hatred. But the fact remains that the greater part of London was NOT burning, our local streets were NOT a war zone. The very areas you'd have expected to be targeted by marauders in search of luxury goods were as quiet as the grave. All I saw when I cycled through Knightsbridge on the way to Mayfair (!) on Tuesday evening were a boarded-up Harrods and shops with their front-window goods removed. All I heard were the distant sounds of sirens punctuating the night air, as they've continued to do; and all I witnessed yesterday was a burnt-out car being towed along the King's Road.

None of which is to say that the affected zones both here and further north would not have been the most frightening places in the world to be; that five good people died senselessly, and that there's nothing more sickening than seeing an injured young man being robbed by those who played Good Samaritans to him. But we mustn't succumb to fear, nor do I expect the spirit here to do so. Still, there were some wrong messages flying around earlier in the week. 'Stay in and stay safe' wrote the organisers of one hip cancelled event on Monday. No: go out, having checked the safety of the area you're visiting, and don't let the bastards wall you up.

Nor did they, as Proms continued to be full to capacity and most theatres functioned. Now we have the fallout, the good and the bad. First a bit of the bad. The 100,000 who signed up to an 'axe the thugs' benefits' plea (like that's going to stop the violence). The Americans who hold prayer rallies for our doomed island while Brits mark it with 'Operation Cup of Tea'. The further disavowals of politicians who say this has nothing to do with deprivation and seem to think that criminality flourishes in a vacuum (well, in a sense it does, but not their sense). Then the good. The shelter offered to those who lost their houses, the pacifying Muslim I heard on the radio this morning down at the Friday rally following the three murders in Birmingham trying to tell his brethren to love their neighbours.

And the clean-ups. Nothing could be more exhilarating than this shot of Clapham Junction the morning after which has gone global by one Andrew Bayles (not the excellent professional photographer, whom I contacted for permission and who took the trouble to point me in another direction, fruitless as it turned out: I'll just work on the assumption that this is fair use and a further propagation of good unless I hear otherwise). The broom army rules!


Back to fear, though: it's responsible for so many of the ills in the world. What you fear is what you don't understand. Global markets topple - 'it's not the end of the world', said our heroine C. J. Cregg presciently in The West Wing back in 2004, 'it's the end of a lifestyle'; America becomes a fortress against the Big Bad World; religions and individuals demonise each other without understanding. I appreciate that there are other cultures where fear is, or was, very real, a tool of tyranny, and that can work in reverse: you carry on fearing even when the threat has been removed, so deep-wired is it. What better to illustrate this than Yevtushenko's poem 'Fears' as courageously set by Shostakovich in his Thirteenth Symphony at a time (the Khrushchev thaw) which the composer probably thought he'd never live to see. Rather than use a less than great Proms film with subtitles, I've turned to the Rozhdestvensky recording and reproduce the poem beneath.



Fears are dying out in Russia
like the ghosts of bygone years,
and only like old women, here and there,
they still beg for alms on the steps of a church.

But I remember them in their strength and power
at the court of triumphing falsehood.
Like shadows, fears crept in everywhere,
and penetrated to every floor.

Gradually, they made people subservient,
and set their seal upon all things:
they taught us to shout when we should have kept silent,
and to shut our mouths when we had need to shout.

Today all this has become remote.
It’s strange even to recall nowadays
the secret fear of being denounced,
the secret fear of a knock at the door.

And what of the fear of speaking to a foreigner?
A foreigner’s one thing, but what of speaking to one’s wife?
And what of the boundless fear of remaining
alone with silence after the brass bands have stopped?

We were not afraid of building in the blizzard,
or of going into battle while shells exploded,
but at times we were mortally afraid
of even talking to ourselves.

We were not corrupted or led astray;
and Russia, having conquered her fears,
gives rise - not without reason - to even
greater fear among her enemies!

I wish that men were possessed of the fear
of condemning a man without proper trial,
the fear of debasing ideas by means of untruth,
the fear of exalting oneself by means of untruth,

the fear of remaining indifferent to others,
when someone is in trouble or depressed,
the desperate fear of not being fearless
when painting on a canvas or drafting a sketch.

And as I write these lines -
and I am in too great a haste at times -
I have only one fear when writing them:
the fear of not writing with all my power.

Finally, we need a lightening of the spirit again. Farewell for now with Bach's blissful motet 'Fürchte dich nicht' ('Be not afraid'). Here endeth the sermon for today.