I keep thinking about this anecdote, told by George Steiner. 1937: the Soviet Writers’ Congress. It was one of the worst years. Every speech gave gratitude to Stalin, to the new model of truth. Except one. Pasternak, silent for three days, finally stands. He says a number: thirty and two thousand people rise to recite, by heart, his translation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30: “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past.”
Steiner says: it was everything. A refusal. You cannot destroy Shakespeare. You cannot destroy the Russian language. You cannot unmake the fact of shared memory. It struck me not as anecdote, but as instruction. I’ve thought of Pasternak often, mostly in proximity to Mandelstam. This makes me want to learn the sonnet by heart.
This is so beautiful, thank you!
Beautiful if mostly apocryphal. My pleasure.
Could you give us the exact reference for this quote please? I’d love to read the whole thing.
I’m afraid the only reference is the clip in the post. The text is a mostly accurate transcription. Please also see Death Zen’s for further fascinating context.
That is indeed a wonderful anecdote, Anthony. And it’s lovely to see all your Steiner posts. I’ve been reading and arguing with him for over 50 years (a calculation that just now made my eyes bug out), and no doubt will enjoy doing so until I’m discharged from this extravaganza.
Today’s rather minor argument with George: There was no Soviet Writers Congress in 1937. The first was held in August, 1934. The second convened in December, 1954.
Steiner alludes to that story again in an essay entitled “The Archives of Eden,” included in a collection I think you’d enjoy: No Passion Spent. He writes:
“But perhaps the concept of choice is itself a fallacy. As I have implied throughout, the intellectual, the inebriate of thought is, like the artist or philosopher, though to a lesser degree, born and not made (nascitur non fit, as every school boy used to know). He has no choice except to be himself or to betray himself. If ‘happiness’ in the definitions central to the theory and practice of ‘the American way of life’ seems to him the greater good, if he does not suspect ‘happiness’ in almost any guise of being the despotism of the ordinary, he is in the wrong business. They order these matters better in the world of the Gulag. Artists, thinkers, writers receive the unwavering tribute of political scrutiny and repression. The KGB and the serious writer are in total accord when both know, when both act on the knowledge that a sonnet (Pasternak simply citing the first line of a Shakespeare sonnet in the venomous presence of Zhdanov), a novel, a scene from a play can be the power-house of human affairs, that there is nothing more charged with the detonators of dreams and action than the word, particularly the word known by heart. (It is striking and perfectly consequent that America, the final archive, should also be the land whose schooling has all but eradicated memorization. In the microfiche, the poem lies embalmed; recited inwardly, it is terribly alive.)”
(I have more serious disagreements with that passage, but I do like his characterization of the intellectual as an “inebriate of thought,” in both its positive and negative sense.)
So, is the anecdote itself apocryphal? Well, Steiner’s version is, but that’s a big part of his charm, isn’t it. Pasternak’s niece, Ann Pasternak Slater, writes about what is very likely the actual event upon which Steiner embellished, a poetry reading in 1946 during which Pasternak risked arrest by reading (not reciting) poems somewhat more dangerous than Shakespeare’s: his own. A man in the crowd yelled out a request for Shakespeare’s 66th sonnet, which (according to Ann) Pasternak was wise to ignore. You can read about this in her essay, “Indirect Dissidence, Shakespeare, and Pasternak,” a chapter in the book Hugo, Pasternak, Brecht, Césaire: Great Shakespeareans Volume XIV</>, edited by Ruth Morse.
Happy New Year, and keep on truckin’!
Thanks, DZ, for the context and reference. It is still a beautiful story, and makes Steiner’s point about memory so well. I will read No Passion Spent. I argue with Steiner from time to time but as with a dear friend. Happy New Year, and thanks for the annual visit!
Amazing anecdote – thank you for sharing this!
My pleasure. Amazing, yes, and a great story.
Thanks for reminding me of that wonderful interview.[There’s an excellent one with Richard Rorty in the same series, similarly moving about his childhood.] On significance of memory and learning by heart there’s a lovely memoir by Alastair Fowler about his supervisor, C.S.Lewis as one of the last scholars to have such an internalised knowledge of the literature he valued. {On a website called LEWISIANA.NL
Cheers John
Thanks so much, John, for mentioning that memoir about CS Lewis. It is fascinating, the prodigious memories of these literary educators. That memoir unfortunately doesn’t seem to live in book form. Thanks also for the Rorty mention which I shall listen to this weekend.
Beautiful!