From "Comrade Auden" by David Collard (Times Literary Supplement, May 20, 2009)
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Auden’s verses apart, there are admittedly prose sections in Three Songs of
Lenin which will provoke a modern audience to uneasy laughter. What are we
to make, for instance, of the following titles from Song Three, which
awaited Auden’s approval, and which appear partly in strident upper case?
“THE GREAT PUPIL OF THE GREAT LENIN, STALIN, HAS LED US INTO BATTLE. / Into
battle with our age-long backwardness.”
Does that second title contain a deliberate, undermining ambiguity? Is
“backwardness” the thing against which the speaker is battling? Or is it the
quality that defines followers of “the great pupil”? And what of the
double-edged cry repeated five times towards the end of the film: “If Lenin
could see our country now!”? Much of the film’s English commentary seems to
a modern audience a balance between plain seriousness and a more troubling,
equivocal tone. The show trials and purges of the Stalin era were still in
the future, of course, but other poets, such as Osip Mandelstam in his
“Stalin Epigram” (1933), were already ferocious in their denunciation of
Lenin’s successor in the wake of enforced collectivization and the famine
which followed, killing millions.
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For more of David Collard's TLS article, and for the poems themselves, click here
Compare to Ern Malley, who attributed to Lenin the fictitious statement, "the emotions are not skilled workers."
