Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...TIME'S story on Russian Poet Osip Mandelstam [Jan. 7], you quote Mandelstam's line about Stalin's "putting a raspberry in his mouth" after each death, and then later, in describing the poet's arrest, you say that Stalin "who was known to like raspberries, put a ripe one in his mouth." Mandelstam's reference to raspberries was in a very special, nonliteral, slang sense. As for Stalin's actual craving for the fruit, who knows? I certainly am unaware of much evidence. Moreover, it is not true that Mandelstam was exiled...
Commissar. In seeking an ogre in history, Historical Novelist Fast (Citizen Tom Paine) need have looked no further than the man in whose honor he was given the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953. But perhaps a contemporary fable would be too painful for Fast. He was an unswervingly militant card-carrying Communist and something of a culture commissar for Communism. Himself a Jew, he became anti-Stalin and quit the Party only when he discovered that Stalin was anti-Jew. This underlies the special weakness of Fast's tale. In fashioning Torquemada as a demented racist and centering...
...antipathy to religion, Red China keeps Sunday as a day of rest. Russia in 1929 undertook the grand secular experiment of staggered days off during an uninterrupted work week, so that one-sixth of the workers were off on any given day. The law was hated so much that Stalin quietly buried it in 1940. Now, except for certain shift work, the general rule in the Soviet Union is the five-day week, which means Saturday and Sunday off. It all goes to show that even people who don't hold that man was made for the Sabbath...
...days later, the Georgian tribesman in the Kremlin, who was known to like raspberries, put a ripe one in his mouth. Betrayed by one of the writers in Pasternak's parlor, Mandelstam was arrested on Stalin's personal order and banished to Siberia. His poetry was suppressed and is still almost entirely unknown in the Soviet Union, while in the West his reputation has been obscured by trite translations...
...three decades after his death, the world is beginning to realize that the man Stalin destroyed was an extraordinary writer and possibly even a great one. In The Prose of Osip Mandelstam (Princeton University; $5). Slavonist Clarence Brown recently provided accurate and arresting translations of the poet's principal stories, and in the current issue of the New York Review of Books, Poet Robert Lowell has published renditions of nine poems that sometimes in raw power and sometimes in fine artistry support comparison with the best poetry of the century...