Stalin the magician.

• Author: Normey, Rob

I have been organizing a human rights film series for the past year, and leading discussions with the audience after the showing. For one of these discussions, I had with me (through Skype) the distinguished writer Stephen Heighton, and we talked about his Novel Every Lost Country, set in Tibet and Nepal. Heighton is a poet, Novelist and short story writer, equally adept at all these genres. We advanced possible parallels between the many brave left wing volunteers, who joined the International Brigades to fight Franco's fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War, and the many subsequent victims of the brutal retribution the dictator meted out to citizens who had supported the Republic, with the situation of dissidents described in Heighton's novel.

After our discussion, I sought out another of the author's books, Stalin's Carnival.It contains a long poetic sequence--Ashes on the Earth: Selected Works of Josef Stalin." These 14 poems take as their starting point the rather shocking fact that Josef Stalin, one of history's most ruthless dictators and a pathological mass murderer, starting out in his early years as a budding poet. Certain biographers claim that Stalin's poetry was fairly banal. Heighton, who should know, takes the view that this fierce revolutionary was, in fact, once a promising poet. One poem is freely translated by the author, who also bases other poems on Stalin's letters and diary entries. It may be that a closer look at the poems can tell us something about the man's unique personality. This Georgian revolutionary was once human! The young Stalin spent his first two decades in Georgia. The very first poem forcefully brings home to us the unimaginable disparity between the young romantic poet, who allows his readers to feel "the harsh grandeur of the Caucasus, /Georgian slopes and orchards" and years later, the new Man of Steel, who "strangled his wife /and slew twenty million others." ("Stalin"--steel, was an assumed name, Jugashvlili being his actual name).

The poems need to be read together to appreciate their cumulative effect. I find Elegy in Winter particularly moving. It recounts the experience of the loss of his second wife Nadezha, on the now "great man" and links it to the never-ending fields of snow--"your flesh has proven snow, and like the rest of them? You melt: white cells and singular crystals trampled, muddied by the stiff boots of soldiers in Red Square." In this poem Heighton imaginatively transposes...