Let’s cherish our poets

“Being a diplomat is a thankless job,” a friend of mine – an ambassador of the highest rank – used to tell me. “When things are going well, you’re only needed to attend pointless parties. And they criticise you for that too, because you bow, kiss hands and raise your glass too often. When things go wrong and you have to try and pick up the pieces of the broken glasses, they criticise you again because, to do your job, you have to disappear and work behind the scenes, and perhaps treat a terrible person with respect – someone you have to talk to if you want to understand where to start again.” He wasn’t entirely wrong: the diplomat’s job is difficult and misunderstood. Now that we’re in times of war, many are protesting and wondering where the diplomats are, without realising that, as my friend said, they’re working quietly to achieve something before some pundit scuppers the negotiations. Then one of these diplomats steps forward to say that we must find a way to get both sides to talk – no easy task at the moment – and everyone complains as if he’d said something strange or as if he’d gone over to the enemy’s side, forgetting that it was precisely a colleague of that diplomat who’d managed to bring home a few children, having been the first to speak of a ‘just, secure and lasting peace’.

Nonetheless, the diplomat’s role is inherently challenging, and our audience remains somewhat naive, as the great Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841) might have observed: ‘They are still so young and naive that they cannot understand a fable unless there is a little lesson at the end. They do not grasp the joke, nor do they sense the irony; quite simply, they are ill-mannered. They continue to ignore the fact that in polite society and in a good book there is no place for direct insults; that contemporary society has devised a far sharper weapon – almost invisible, yet lethal – which, under the guise of flattery, can inflict precise and inescapable blows. Our audience is like a provincial who, having overheard a conversation between two diplomats linked to rival courts, comes to the conclusion that each is deceiving their own government for the sake of their deepest mutual friendship.”

So said this poor, desperate poet, in his most famous prose work, “Un eroe del nostro tempo”, in response to those who reproached him for presenting a wretched character as a positive hero, without stating directly and prosaically that he was indeed such a figure. He replied that the moral would come through all the same; it had already arrived, not in abstract discourse, but in the clear illustration and depiction – as a poet – of the nonsense, the senseless randomness and the corruption that drove that world, and which he had already expressed as an incontrovertible judgement in everything he had written (think of “A Masked Ball” or The Demon*) and subsequently reiterated in a poem composed on the occasion of Pushkin’s death in a duel which many believed to have been orchestrated at the very highest levels:

“And you, haughty offspring / of fathers illustrious for their notorious cowardice, / who with servile heels have trampled upon the footsteps / of lineages wronged by the vagaries of fate! / You, who as a ravenous mob surround the throne, / you, executioners of Liberty, of Genius, and of Glory! / You hide yourselves in the shadow of the law, / and before you all is silent: courts and justice alike!… / But there is still God’s judgement, servants of corruption! / There is still the final judgement: and it awaits you; / deaf to the clink of gold, / it has always known your thoughts and deeds. / And then slander will be in vain: / it will offer you no help once more, / and with all your vile blood you shall not wash away / the righteous blood of the poet”.

The verdict was clear, explicit and detailed, and those who needed to understand did so. Even the very young Lermontov met the same fate as Pushkin and died in a duel which many believed, for the second time in the space of a few years, to have been ‘orchestrated at the very top’.

It is a terrible story of a country that fails to protect its poets, and also of those who, like us, forget them.