Solzhenitsyn’s return
Sir, – Zinovy Zinik believes (Letters, December 5) that I miss the irony of a
remark about Alexander Solzhenitsyn by Alexander Genis: “In its own way it
is, I feel, a courageous and dignified role – to be one of the last
remaining prophets of Apollo in the abandoned temple of absolute truth”. If,
as Zinik appears to think, this is Genis’s way of saying that he does not
find courage and dignity in Solzhenitsyn’s position, however remote it may
be from his own, then the passage falls flat. I cited Genis not only as one
sceptical towards Solzhenitsyn, but as an essayist whom I admire.
For the rest, Zinik will have your readers know that Solzhenitsyn is a very
bad man, and argues with commensurate sophistication. He confuses the Order
of Lenin with the Lenin Prize for Literature, and tells you that Khrushchev
nominated Solzhenitsyn for it, much as Putin awarded him a prize more
recently. This attempt to reduce Solzhenitsyn’s years of struggle with the
Soviet authorities, including a failed attempt to assassinate him, to a blip
on the chart of a deep-seated affinity with despotism suffers badly from the
fact that Khrushchev never did nominate Solzhenitsyn for the Lenin Prize.
That was done as a rearguard action by Solzhenitsyn’s liberal ally Alexander
Tvardovsky, editor of Novy mir. Back in the present, nominations for the
Russian State Prize for outstanding achievement in the humanities come from
a council including Academicians and eminent figures in the arts. The
previous winner was the late Patriarch Aleksii II. Solzhenitsyn thought it
an award he could be proud to accept. Zinik knows better.
But it is surely enough for Zinik to cite Varlam Shalamov, a great writer of
the Gulag theme who has accused Solzhenitsyn, particularly in his
posthumously published notebooks, of being a mendacious political
manipulator? We don’t need to know that Solzhenitsyn contested Shalamov’s
version in print when first it appeared. Or that in the early years Shalamov
wrote a poem commemorating their first meeting and wrote praising his works.
Or that Solzhenitsyn admired Shalamov as stylist (“you can’t get a
razor-blade between his words”) and tried to persuade Tvardovsky to publish
his camp verse. Or that in The Gulag Archipelago he acknowledged Shalamov as
his indisputable senior in the depth and grimness of his experience of the
camps, while contesting Shalamov’s bleak and thoroughly modern view of the
extinction of the spirit in that world. Shalamov was not just cheated of
recognition when the official door slammed behind Ivan Denisovich, but wrote
for years in conditions of isolation, illness, growing deafness and
embitterment. Yes, they fell out badly, but I have admired Shalamov for
forty years and reducing these lives and disagreements to a crude Punch and
Judy show seems deeply unworthy.
If anyone shares my unease with Zinovy Zinik’s mode of argument, they should
turn instead to Zinik’s novels. There they will find a writer with a wry and
subtle eye for the tangle of human life, far from this kind of flash-card
polemics.
MICHAEL NICHOLSON
University College, Oxford.
Warhead reduction
Sir, – Christopher Coker, in his review of What Next? by Christopher Patten
(December 5), writes that “ . . . the real reason why the Great Powers are
unlikely to reduce their own stocks [of nuclear weapons] is their
agnosticism about disarmament”. I find it rather intriguing that a Professor
of International Relations has so casually discounted a clear example of
conversion to the faith by the United States and Russia (one presumes they
are the “Great Powers” to which he refers).
Under the 2002 Moscow Treaty On Strategic Offensive Reductions – signed by
President Bush and then President Putin, and since ratified by both the
United States and Russia – the two countries agreed that by 2012 each would
reduce its number of strategic nuclear warheads to 1,700–2,200, a reduction
of nearly two-thirds below 2002 levels. That would seem a very significant
reduction indeed.
Though it must be admitted that both countries still have some way to go. As
of October 1, 2008, the United States had 5,951 such warheads and Russia
4,138. One trusts their treaty commitment to the disarmament faith will
produce expeditious results over the next four years.
MARK COLLINS
1029 Carling Avenue #8, Ottawa.
Donne’s books
Sir, – In “Still in circulation” (December 5), Anthony Hobson writes that Sir
Thomas Knyvett’s over 1,400 books were “about the same number as were owned
by John Donne at his death in 1631”. However, the actual size of Donne’s
library at his death remains unclear: the schedule attached to his will that
listed the books to be given to his friends is lost and we have no account
of the number of books sold, with his plate, to benefit his heirs.
The 213 extant books listed in the bibliography compiled by the late Sir
Geoffrey Keynes – many originally identified in the pages of the TLS – have
been augmented by discoveries over the past thirty-five years, and the total
has now grown to around 300. This number is still far short of the total
listed in the article. Perhaps there is some confusion with “the resultance
of 1400 Authors, most of them abridged and analyzed with his own hand” that
Izaak Walton reports in his “Life” of Donne? (Henry King in his prefatory
letter to the “Life” talks of being left “all his Sermon-Notes, and his
other Papers, containing an Extract of near Fifteen hundred Authors”.) While
his collection of notes bears an important relationship to his reading, we
have no way of ascertaining the exact relationship between these extracts
and the books that he owned.
PIERS BROWN
University of Toronto, Toronto.
Egmi Bikower
Sir, – The name “Egmi Bikower”, the “ubiquitous Hungarian white wine” which
Zbigniew Herbert and Katarzyna Dzieduszycka drank during their courtship (as
reported in Cynthia Haven’s Commentary article, December 12), bears a more
than passing phonetic resemblance to Egri Bikaver, the famous and delicious
“Bulls’ Blood from Eger”. Legend has it that the Turks withdrew from a siege
of Eger when they heard that the red stains on the beards of the inhabitants
were the result of bulls’ blood being their favourite tipple – an effect
hardly likely to be produced by white wine.
ANTHONY RIDGE
33 King’s Avenue, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire. Toscanini
Toscanini
Sir, – Donald Rayfield writes, “Toscanini or Karajan were not worse conductors
for being unable to play any instrument to the standard of their own
players” (December 12). But Arturo Toscanini at any rate was a professional
orchestral player before he was a conductor. In 1887, aged nineteen,
Toscanini played cello at La Scala in the premiere of Verdi’s Otello, and
from Harvey Sachs’s biography we learn, as we might expect, that Toscanini
as cellist was a scrupulous perfectionist. In rehearsing Otello, he played
one passage, marked pianissimo, too softly for the composer’s liking, and in
1933, when Gregor Piatigorsky got out his cello in hopes that Toscanini
would play it, the conductor devoted himself to tuning until it was time for
lunch.
A. D. ROBERTS
8b Lancaster Drive, London NW3.
‘Arcicioffo’
Sir, – Permit me to defend the honour of the Genoese in relation to the
artichoke (see Roderick Conway Morris’s review of Ronnie Ferguson’s
Linguistic History of Venice, December 12). The OED attributes the
derivation of the English word to the North Italian forms, “arcicioffo” and
“arciciocco”. I assume these resemble the Venetian dialect. However, to this
day, the Genoese form of the Italian “carcioffo” is “ardigioco” –
much more like the modern English and, indeed, closer to the earliest
English forms that OED cites in that it has the “d” in place of the “ci” in
the other North Italian forms.
While Genoese boasts that the English adopted St George from their Banco di
San Giorgio may be greatly exaggerated, the OED supports their claims to
have given us “jeans”, which derives directly from the city’s name: so
perhaps the artichoke too?
CHRISTOPHER THOMSON
Keymer House, 9a Stanford Avenue, Hassocks, West Sussex.
Dirk Bogarde
Sir, – I’m with Frederic Raphael about the pompous, sleep-inducing Death in
Venice. Far more entertaining is The Singer Not the Song (a still from which
illustrated Raphael’s superb review of Bogarde’s letters, November 14). Dirk
camps through it as a leather-clad Mexican bandit with the hots for John
Mills’s “Oirish” priest. Dirk leads a gang of bandidos with huge sombreros
but impeccable RADA accents. It was based on a novel by a British author
who, allegedly, had never been west of St Ives. Its demented excesses look
forward to Sergio Leone’s westerns. Unmissable.
TERENCE DENMAN
3 Worcester Gardens, London SW11.
Sir, – Joseph O’Leary thinks that the film of Death in Venice “never fails to
cast its spell on the viewer” (Letters, December 12). It is hard to see how
anyone writing from a department of English (or indeed any other) Literature
could in so cavalier a manner dismiss the subjective response to a work of
the imagination. When I first saw the film in Oxford, many years ago, I
liked it. Coming out, however, I heard an undergraduate say “that’s the most
boring film I have ever seen”. Quot homines, tot sententiae.
DORAINE POTTS
12a Bushcombe Close, Woodmancote, Cheltenham.
‘La Périchole’
Sir, – Patrick O’Connor (Dec ember 12) misses La Périchole’s reincarnation as
the actress Dolores Garcia in André Maurois’s charming autobiographical
novel Les Roses de septembre, published in 1958 by the Bodley Head in Gerard
Hopkins’s English translation as September Roses.
JOHN ARDILL
8 Birkbeck Road, London NW7.
Hovering pen
Sir, – The TLS Editor’s pen was right to “hover questioningly” (This Week,
December 12) over the claim that St George’s, Bloomsbury, has the only
statue of a king on the outside of a British church. All Saint’s,
Northampton, has a statue of Charles II on its portico. This commemorates
the king’s generosity in helping to rebuild this Roundhead town after its
own Great Fire. Every Oak Apple Day it is crowned with oak leaves.
MARK VALENTINE
Stable Cottage, Kildwick, Yorkshire.
