Poet-turned-Dictator
His poems became minor classics. They were published in anthologies and young kids would memorize his poems at school. This could almost describe any of the several well-known poets we are all familiar with today, right? Wrong! The poet I’m refering to is Stalin.
That’s right, before Stalin became the ruthless dictator, he was very interested in poetry and literature in general. According to an article published by the Guardian Unlimted, Stalin’s interest in poetry did not die down after he became a dicatator:
The poems’ romantic imagery is derivative, but their beauty lies in the rhythm and language. Poetry remained a part of Stalin’s life right up to and even during his three decades as tyrant, leading him to protect some poets and destroy others.
At the time Stalin was writing poetry, modernism was becoming en vogue among the literati. But the young dicatator had other theories in mind when working on his own verse:
The ex-romantic poet despised and destroyed modernism, but promoted socialist realism, his distorted version of romanticism. He knew Nekrasov and Pushkin by heart, read Goethe and Shakespeare in translation, and could recite Walt Whitman.
There’s no doubt that Stalin knew his literature. So one has to wonder why he became the dicatator that he did. I’m by no means a scholar on Stalin or even his rise to be a dictator, but I’ll guess that his personality was already pre-wired to become such a ruthless murderer and he would’ve become a dictator with or without poetry.
I guess poets are a shifty bunch! Just kidding. Seriously though, this just goes to show that literature can spread its fingers all over the world and it’s always a surprise to see who those fingers touch.
Read the entire Guardian article here:
Before the terror
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