The road to hell is accessible to poets, from Orpheus at last, and Ante-Dante many made the journey. For example, on this day in DCLXXXIII AUC has been a poet so insipid in his slavish devotion to the Emperor I prefer his namesake Orang-utan in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, Vergil, who I would like much better if hed ditched Dante in the Inferno, and who was hailed for centuries as a prophet by high church lit fags. He is still cited as a Prophet by Fundies who refuse to believe the miracle child was supposed to be the child of Mark Antony and Olivia. Another poet born this day was Mikhail Lermontov, who carried Hell with him, or at least a fine existential nausea for which he sought surcease thre writing, dissipation, and an ultimately successful search for self destruction thru a disregard for his own life that made his name a byword for heroism in the Caucasus and also lead him into duels in which he would fire his gun in the air, but one of those did him in. I so loved Dostoyevski, I tried other Russians. I found Lermontovs masterpiece, A Hero for Our Time claustrophobic in its Nihilism. I leave literary criticism to the native speakers Vladimir Nabokov (who translated the novel into English) was not so sure about the language: The English reader should be aware that Lermontovs prose style in Russian is inelegant, it is dry and drab; it is the tool of an energetic, incredibly gifted, bitterly honest, but definitely inexperienced young man. His Russian is, at times, almost as crude as Stendhals in French; his similes and metaphors are utterly commonplace, his hackneyed epithets are only redeemed by occasionally being incorrectly used. Repetition of words in descriptive sentences irritates the purist, D.S. Mirsky thought differently: The perfection of Lermontovs style and narrative manner can be appreciated only by those who really know Russian, who feel fine imponderable shades of words and know what has been left out as well as what has been put in. Lermontovs prose is the best Russian prose ever written, if we judge by the standards of perfection and not by those of wealth. It is transparent, for it is absolutely adequate to the context and neither overlaps it nor is overlapped by it. In Russia A Hero of Our Times seems to have never lost its relevance: the title itself became a token phrase explaining dilemmas haunting the countrys intelligentsia. And Lermontovs reputation of a heir to Pushkin there is seldom doubted. His foreign biographers, though, tend to see a more complicated and controversial picture. According to Lewis Bagby: He led such a wild, romantic life, fulfilled so many of the Byronic features (individualism, isolation from high society, social critic and misfit), and lived and died so furiously, that it is difficult not to confuse these manifestations of identity with his authentic self. …Who Lermontov had become, or who he was becoming, is unclear. Lermontov, like many a romantic hero, once closely examined, remains as open and unfinished as his persona seems closed and fixed. Also born this day was a Prophet of Ubermensch. Wiki describes Nietzsche as a poet, and he certainly stared into the Abyss until she stared back, and proves at odds with his many caricatures as any Romantic hero or Gus Riefenstahl. A man who prefaced his devastating criticism of the Mosaic code by saying, thankfully, Jews no longer belived that shit, and so hated Prussia he went stateless and passed himself off as being of Polish descent! My favorite Nietzsche story is that this ubermensch who dispraised compassion went mad at the sight of a peasant beating a horse! Possibly the greatest poet born this day was the much married Fela Kuti, who lived thru several iterations of Hell without even having to go on the road, and died of AIDS. I will never hear the phrase Unknown Soldier with respect again. youtube/watch?v=KYAiw1DLBzE
Posted on: Wed, 15 Oct 2014 10:00:05 +0000
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