#pasternak

PHOTO OF THE DAY 3-2-22 

Now that I am home, and have access to all of my images, I wondered if I had any blue and yellow images to add to the visual chorus of peace loving people around the world in a show of support for the people of Ukraine. Today, in my Facebook Memories, this peaceful image appeared and reminding me how we all share the same moon and the same beautiful world.

— in Santa Cruz, California.

Jerry Downs

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This is a story I heard being told by George Steiner, the essayist and philosopher, in an interview for a Dutch TV series called “Of Beauty and Consolation”, in which they discuss the importance of memory. I thought it was a story that deserved to be retold.

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“We are what we remember”

+ “It was 1937, the soviet writers congress. It was the worst year. One of the worst years. People disappeared like flies everyday. They told Pasternak “If you speak they arrest you, and if you don’t speak they arrest you — for ironic insubordination." There are 2000 people at the event. It is a three day event. Just off stage stands Zjdanov, the Stalinist killer, police killer. It was a three day meeting and every speech was thanks to brother Stalin, thanks to Father Stalin, thanks to the Leninist-Stalinist new model of truth, and not a word from Pasternak.

On the third day his friends said: “Look, they are going to arrest you anyway, maybe you should say something for the rest of us to carry with us.” (…) and when Pasternak got up, everyone knew. He got up and I’m told you could hear the silence still Vladivostok. And he gave a number. A number, and two thousand people stood up. Thirty. It was the number of a certain Shakespeare sonnet — of which Pasternak had done a translation which the Russians say, with Pushkin, is one of their greatest texts, so Shakespeare: “When I summon up remembrance of things past”. 

A sonnet of Shakespeare on memory. And they recited it by heart, the 2000 people, the Pasternak translation. It said everything. It said: you can’t touch us; you can’t destroy Shakespeare; you can’t destroy Russian language; you can’t destroy the fact that we know by heart what Pasternak has given us. And they didn’t arrest him.

 (…) Well, even if the sons of bitches do arrest you, it’s too late. The people already have your treasure with them.”

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William Shakespeare "Remembrance of things past" – Sonnet 30 When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste. Then can I drown an eye, unus’d to flow, For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night, And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe, And moan th’ expense of many a vanish’d sight. Then can I grieve at grievances foregone, And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan, Which I new pay as if not paid before. But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, All losses are restor’d, and sorrows end.

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