The poems he [Benedict Anderson] memorized in his youth stayed with him always. In 2007, he was invited to Leningrad to assist with a class on nationalism for young teachers in Russian provincial universities. Addressing them, he remembered some Russian from his days at Eton and proceeded to recite the final stanza of a poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky, who perished, amid murky circumstances, in Moscow in 1930. To his astonishment, all of the students joined with him:
Shine always,
Shine everywhere,
To the depth of the last day!
Shine—
And to hell with everything else!
That’s my motto—
And the sun’s!
“I was in tears by the end,” recalls Anderson. “Some of the students, too.”
http://www.thenation.com/article/benedict-andersons-view-of-nationalism/
I sent the above to my old friend Alan in Dunedin.
He replies (he once had a Russian tutor named Natasha) -
Yes, it is astonishing, isn't it!
And I doubt that it ever happens with English-language poets -
have you ever come across that?
I remember hearing (probably from Natasha Templeton)
that another Russian (Voznezhensky? Pasternak?)
at an infrequent reading (in Russian, of course) found that the entire
darkened auditorium was filled with the voices of the audience,
saying his lines with him. Brings a tear to my eye.
Alan
|