dumbfoundry

Even at the beginning of his life, the received wisdom is wrong. Far from being an ill-educated dullard, Stalin was picked out as a boy of enormous promise. In 19th-century Georgia, the Orthodox Church seminaries offered a prestigious schooling for boys like him from poor backgrounds who would otherwise have had to become factory apprentices. He trained until his 21st year to become a priest, of all things. As an adolescent he read great swathes of secular literature against the seminary rules. Walking round the gloomy dormitories of this building in Tbilisi in summer 2002, I could well appreciate why he found the priestly atmosphere stultifying. One of his outlets was poetry, and such was the limpid quality of his verses that they were published in the chief Georgian literary journals of the 1890s. [...]

Joseph Stalin was a poet, although you wouldn't know it. Here are some of the lines written by the greatest mass murderer in human history: "The pinkish bud has opened / Rushing to the pale-blue violet / And, stirred by a little breeze / The lily of the valley has bent over the grass." Fluffy verses of the "Hello, sun! Hello, sky!" variety that would shame even Fotherington-Thomas poured from Stalin's pen when he was 16 and 17, before he embarked on his better known careers of revolution and genocide.

Robert Service believes that Stalin's poetry is helpful in understanding the romantic side to his temperament. Indeed, he is at considerable pains to portray Stalin as much more than just a dour but murderous backroom bureaucrat. In the course of this engrossing and well-researched book, Stalin emerges as a fascinating, complex figure.

This entry was posted by eeksypeeksy on Sunday, October 31, 2004 at 10:28 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.