1917

October/November 2017, depending on which calendar you use, charts the centenary of the Russian Revolution.
Who will dust off Vladimir Iliych Lenin, I wonder?
For myself, never able to follow the straight path, I’d like to remember ALEXANDER KERENSKY.

1
Alexander Kerensky has head of the Provisional Government in 1917, when Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized control.
Was he the head? His title was, at the crucial last stage, Second Minister-Chairman.
He had served the Prov Gov as Minister of Justice, and Minister of War, before this. He was also chairman of the all-important Petrograd Soviet. His credentials were good.

The Prov Gov consisted of a conglomerate of parties, groups, such as the powerful Social Revolutionary Party, the Mensheviks,  Kadets and many others with their own spheres of interest. It was a Provisional Government, because its function was to hold power after the fall of the Tsar, and until a new Constituent Assembly was formed, to decide what form Russia would take from thereon.

Aleaxander Kerensky, however, pushed matters: he declared Russia a republic.
This was contrary to the aims of several groups in the Prov Gov.
His other great misjudgement was to push for the continuation of the Great War. He even went out to the various war fronts to rally the troops into continuing the ruinous war. The scale of desertions from the military was unprecedented. This was to have far-reaching consequences for Kerensky.

This maverick nature was the tone of the times.
Cue, General Kornilov.
Some call his counter-revolutionary followers a putative White Army. He challenged the Prov Gov’s legitimacy, and threatened to take Petrograd. Karensky had lost the support of what was left of the military. Who could he call upon who had sufficient military arms and techniques, to defend the Provisional Government?
There was only the Bolshevik Party, and its leader, Lenin, was once more on the doorstep.

The Bolsheviks were highly trained, and master tacticians. One toe in the door for them was all they needed. And that is what they were given.

Aleaxander Kerensky’s father had been a school teacher, then school inspector. In his teaching one pupil taught was the son of a close family, the Ulyanov family. The son was Vladimir Iliych Ulyanov, later known as Lenin.

2
Kerensky attempted to raise a group to fight back, but by then there were two fronts: the Bolsheviks, and the White Army. Kerensky would take neither side. Wiki tells us: Only one small force, a subdivision of the 2nd company of the First Petrograd Women’s Battalion, also known as The Women’s Death Battalion, was willing to fight for the government against the Bolsheviks….

He escaped to France, and lived in Paris. He travelled to America occasionally to raise money for his scheme, but still did not side with either group.
On the Invasion of France in 1940, however, he chose to re-locate permanently to America. It was then he offered his support to Stalin against the German invasion of Russia. It measured just how out of touch he was by this time.

He had married an Australian journalist, Lydia Tritton. They eventually moved to Australia, Brisbane, and lived with her family. She suffered a stroke, however, and died a short  time after.

He returned to America, and worked with the Hoover Administration; he became a New Yorker (91st Street, Upper East Side), and also taught at Stanford University, in California.

When he died in 1970, however, the local Russian Orthodox Churches refused him burial due to his Freemasonry, and what they read to be his giving away Russia to the Bolsheviks. Even the Serbian Church refused him.
Friends in London brought him over, for a non-denominational burial. He is buried in Putney Vale Cemetery, near Wimbledon Common, London: South perimeter, block AS, grave 1289.

3
Kronstadt, 1921
That marks the year the people’s rebellion in Russia ended.
It was a particularly cold winter, so cold that even the Gulf of Finland, outside of Petrograd, froze over. Ice-locked there was the Naval fortress of Kronstadt, the last bastion of the original fighters.
Trotsky’s Red Army came over the ice that night. The fighting was long and fierce; in the end the fighters were crushed, officers executed, and sailors shipped off to Archangel.
The people’s rebellion was over: they wanted out of the Great War, better standards of life; a chance of betterment: social and economic mobility; food.
They got Leninism, Civil War, 5-Year Plans, Collectivisation and its famines, then Stalinism etc

The Finno-Swedish writer Edith Sodergran reports she heard the shooting that night, way over and out in the Gulf. The night was so still, the air so cold.

4
Death Island
A recent BBC news article gave us the details of what it called the First Concentration Camp. It was called Death Island, the island of Mudyug, in the sea off Archangel, Russia. On the Arctic Circle.
It was a camp set up by the British and French military, who were in Russia attempting to fight the Bolsheviks. The camp’s reputation for cruelty, neglect, terrible conditions, became a Soviet legend, a place for pilgrimage.
For the Soviets, though, just a few miles away was a monastery. This, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn documented in his Gulag Archipelago, surely eclipsed the first camp for inhumanity. Not excuse, though, note.

It was to this camp on Mudyug Island, that the Kronstadt sailors were shipped. None survived. It was not that the people who ran the camp were working with/colluding with the Bolsheviks, it was ignorance, stupidity: they imprisoned anyone who caused trouble, no matter which political group they belonged to, or none.

It was also here, the article states, that a French-Russian officer, and former businessman from Moscow… Ernest Beaux worked as counter-intelligence interrogator of Bolsheviks. His reputation soon established itself: he was not a pleasant man.
What was his business? He was a perfumier for the Tsar. Later he worked for Coco Chanel.
It is said that the much-valued Chanel No5 was his creation.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-41271418

If this was the first concentration camp, then what of The Enormous Room, E E Cummings’ fictionalised account of his own incarceration in a similar camp, the Dépôt de Triage, at La Ferté-Macé, in France?

4
Putney Vale Cemetery
Is it the non-denominational nature of the site, but this cemetery plays hosts to many other luminaries, besides Alexander Kerensky?
You will find there Nyree Dawn Porter; a Doctor Who (no, they don’t all regenerate); Antony Blunt, soviet-era spy and master of the Queens Pictures; Ivy Compton-Burnett; Howard Carter, Egyptologist; Jacob Epstein….

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putney_Vale_Cemetery

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Kerensky

 

 

 

CAFÉ MEULLER

after the dance-theatre performance of the Pina Bausch company

‘We must talk’ you say, ‘sit here, listen’.
The moment is a revolving door
I do not know how to stop, or close;
our table a sun on a scorching planet —
we have wandered there naked, burnt,
and lost amongst its crumbs, metal.

French windows gape like dark wings draped
over the city; and louvred windows hold aloof
their fragile, distant aches.
In their assimilation there is no longer place
for us. Your words are hot —
and the night grows colder. I long for you
but taste only ashes
not peaches, gingered melon.

We have died here before — the waiter
wraps us warm in the embrace
of a thousand passing presumptions,
asks us to chose; I can take none.
We are what we civilise of the wildness in us;
I have blood in my mouth
and the melancholy of pain, like hunger.
Who is this other? She is giddy with the possibility
the naked and the tabletop offer equally;
an ostentation of preparations.
We are deficient, and the menu lessens us further.

Who is waiting at the door? Window? Wall?
Why are we all here? So sit and sit and sit.
Relationships break here, wives
leave, and husbands stand at the flung open
french windows: an offering to the sky.
The night detonates: they stare back, burnt out;
and all the candles flare, then fail.

Our pain is a mirror — the clock’s tells
and its reckless readings circle the words
‘Leave’ and ‘me’; its chime
muffles the smothered ’Never’.
The room always empty, but populated,
a carved-out place of space,
served up on fine platters
— listen
can you hear the rustle of moments
coalescing? A fine meal we make of this.

She said this ring is a broken tone
the wall-clock has forgotten, and won’t take back.
He twists it around and around his finger, wishing,
for this is the day of the continuous lie — a tall tale:
what was once broken, is twice unmended;
— what was once said, is twice unremedied.

And the child’s hand slips from hers, the baby’s cry
unheard in the bustle and hub of the hall;
her nerves wire the walls,  flare the light
as the current flickers again. To be left alone,
empty, as a coat left, hung on the wall….

To be caught is to be in the cup that drips
then is wiped away with a serviette;
to be lost is to be forever going and not going
at the same time, in the same place
is to be found in the tale that breaks off
but does not,
amongst the communion,
and the cutlery.

The break is the tale’s breathing, it continues always:
the room, and the haunting — the window,
and the blind hurt, the bleeding,
and the doors
endlessly
revolving

 

It Being Sunday (from the Dutch)

It being Sunday, the character of the gift of this day is still to be found at the bottom-back of its drawer in this house.

Should I therefore dedicate this state of mind, of this momentary loss of angst, to that delayed discovery?  I am reminded of that couple’s shock and wonder at finding her father’s  fob-watch long kept and pristine in its packing, to be worth many thousands of pounds because of the uniqueness of the mechanism: a real tic-toc movement, and not just the regular toc-toc of most of our days.
Their Sunday was a full movement, and expansive, whilst the regular was a shot-off, half-hearted regularity that proves the normality. Their characteristic gift was the uniqueness that was the real and the rule that all else fell against in a mouthy clatter. I was happy to see them, their surprise was genuine, there was no stain of deserving in their expressions, it ran through them like unused mill water, as open to the sky as their faces to the switching emotions started up by the antiques expert’s pronouncement.

As open to the sky, nothing hidden away, but also not kept in oneself – running clear as language expressing itself fully for once, rather than the wasted, tragic form of one’s usual self-expression. Hmm. Something comes clear after long, long months of rustling through the drawers and cupboards of oneself: strange to find within oneself a kernel, an object of outsideness, almost a door… a fissure?… no, but more of a technique, a quality, of the outside.

On waking… is maybe the best of times, the day’s long building-up, re-building from sudden ruins, the affirmations of a self not yet underway, defences down, and all the regular little tropes of selfishness not yet active: don’t think, and so activate them all. Rattle around emptily inside one’s head before it stalls, gets in gear its sense of self – and open to a surprising adventure, tending the modes of thought and memory like young, vulnerable plants – young lettuce, in their beds? No, I can take anything but not that – lying idle there outside the narrow frame of one’s daily … a billiard’s game: earnestly try to pocket those balls that are aims, or thoughts, or hopes, down their appropriate holes of achievement, but constantly having your elbow nudged when lined-up for shooting. And by the other-self that cannot allow achievement, that dark one so coloured with doubts and sulks and glooms, and little else of any worth. The task therefore is to turn these around: the pattern says to turn them inside out: positive those negatives….

This day’s little hidden gift pays homage to patterns, but still runs around wiily-nilly as though sufficient such running could make one pay little heed to the constructions of one’s activities.

And which is best, of most value? The gift itself… or the packaging?

Negative Energy, by Richard Livermore. Book Review

Negative Energy, by Richard Livermore.
24 Essays and Blogs. Elefantasia Press, 2016

ISBN: 976-1911357-17-9                  Price £.7.99 (Postage free in the UK)

The book can be purchased from:
Richard Livermore, 6/1 Jamaica Mews, Edinburgh, EH3 6HN, Scotland, UK.
livermore.chanticleer.richard@gmail.com
http://www.chanticleer-press.com/

 

https://michael9murray.wordpress.com/2016/09/24/book-review-negative-energy/

3 Reasons you should buy this book

This book is a great place for skinny-dipping  in The Western Canon, as Harold Bloom calls it  Swim without prejudice; just your own sweet self.

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The book is a treasure-house of known things, things unknown,  and things we thought we knew but didn’t really.

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If you need any more reasons, then try these:

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Recommended book.