...जरी त्या क्रांतीचा मुडदा पडला तरी...The Russian Revolutions@100

Tomorrow March 8 2017 will be the centenary of the start of the February Revolution (8/3/1917 -16/3/1917) in Russia.  It was followed by the October Revolution that started on November 7 1917. 

'Bolshevik’, 1920, by Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev

Isaiah Berlin, ‘A Message to the Twenty-First Century’, The New York Review of Books, November 25, 1994/ October 23 2014:

“IT WAS THE best of times, it was the worst of times.” With these words Dickens began his famous novel A Tale of Two Cities. But this cannot, alas, be said about our own terrible century. Men have for millennia destroyed each other, but the deeds of Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon (who introduced mass killings in war), even the Armenian massacres, pale into insignificance before the Russian Revolution and its aftermath: the oppression, torture, murder which can be laid at the doors of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and the systematic falsification of information which prevented knowledge of these horrors for years—these are unparalleled. They were not natural disasters but preventable human crimes, and whatever those who believe in historical determinism may think, they could have been averted...”

 
Simon Sebag Montefiore, ‘The Romanovs: 1613-1918’, 2016:

“...Marx wrote that ‘History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.’ This was witty but far from true. History is never repeated, but it borrows, steals, echoes and commandeers the past to create a hybrid, something unique out of the ingredients of past and present. No tsars were to rule Russia after 1917, yet each of Nicholas’s successors, who ruled the same empire with many of the same challenges in entirely different circumstances, channelled, adapted and blended the prestige of the Romanovs with the zeitgeist of their own times.

  

Lenin had lost Ukraine, the Caucasus and much else at Brest-Litovsk – and without Ukraine, Russia would cease to be a great power. But ultimately Lenin shrewdly reassembled the Romanov empire, losing only Finland, Poland and the Baltics.

Even as Stalin outmanoeuvred his rivals to succeed Lenin, he privately believed that Russia needed a ‘tsar’: in April 1926, he mused that, although the Party ruled, ‘the people understand little of this. For centuries the people in Russia were under a tsar. The Russian people are tsarist . . . accustomed to one person being at the head. And now there should be one.’ He studied Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great particularly. ‘The people need a tsar,’ he said in the 1930s, ‘whom they can worship and for whom they can live and work.’ He carefully crafted his own image to create a new template of tsar, fatherly and mysterious, industrial and urban, the leader of an internationalist mission yet the monarch of the Russians...”

  

Max Hastings, The Spectator, December 2016:

”..., in the matter of scale, the Russian revolutionaries and their later successors in China achieved a record of mass killings such as even the Nazis struggled to match.

The world will no doubt experience the consequences of plenty more barren ideologies and brutal dictatorships, but it is doubtful that any will impose as much misery as did the doctrine first empowered by the Bolshevik revolution. Its looming receivership offers just cause for gratitude.”

John Gray:
 "Driven by ‘an amalgam of self-admiration and self-contempt’, intellectual and political leaders in Russia, China, India, Africa and the Islamic world responded to the incursions of imperialism by attempting to transform their societies along Western lines. Rejecting traditional elites and values, they imbibed Western ideologies, such as Marxism and Social Darwinism. By emulating the West, they hoped to defeat it. Instead, they have succumbed to the West’s pathologies and disorder"

Artist: Saul Steinberg (1914-1999), The New Yorker, February 25 1961

वरील इंग्रजी अवतरणातून रशियन क्रांतीने  जगात काय घडवून आणले  हे समजते. आणखी एक गोष्ट म्हणजे या आधीच्या  अमेरिकन (१७६५-१७८३) आणि  फ्रेंच (१७८९-१७९९) क्रांत्यांना जे जमल नाही ते या क्रांतीने केले:  तीने महाराष्ट्राच्या (वाङ्मयीन) सांस्कृतिक जीवनात दीर्घ पल्ल्याची उलथापालथ नक्कीच घडवून आणली.

तिचे भयानक रक्तरंजित वास्तव आणि आर्थिक दिवाळखोरी साक्षर महाराष्ट्रात समजायला कित्येक दशके लागली. पण तो पर्यंत डझनाने मराठी साहित्यिक (उदा: साने गुरुजी, आचार्य अत्रे, कुसुमाग्रज, शं वा किर्लोस्कर, अनंत काणेकर, पु य देशपांडे, वि स  खांडेकर, ग त्र्यं माडखोलकर, वि वा हडप ...) तिच्या (आणि पर्यायाने मार्क्सवादाच्या) प्रोपॅगांडाला कमी-जास्त प्रमाणात बळी पडले होते. लेखनात समाजवादी असण्याला मराठी साहित्य विश्वात मोठी प्रतिष्ठा मिळायला सुरवात झाली. समाजवाद आणि वास्तववाद  याची गल्लत व्हायला सुरवात झाली. क्रांती हा शब्द मराठीत सहज वापरला जाऊ लागला. भांडवलदार, (मोठा) जमीनदार ह्या शिव्या बनल्या. साहित्य कृतीत चालेल पण पैशा बद्दल साहित्य विश्वात बोलायच नाही असा पायंडा पडत गेला. लेखकांमध्ये विज्ञानाच महत्व दिवसेंदिवस  वाढत गेल आणि देवाच कमी होत गेल. नास्तिक असण्याला सुद्धा प्रतिष्ठा आली.

रशियन क्रांती- पहिल्या महायुद्ध काळात नावाजलेला धुरीण (समाजातील अल्पजन) वर्ग (ह ना आपटे, वि स खांडेकर, ना सी फडके, विश्राम बेडेकर ...), ज्यावर १९व्या आणि आधीच्या शतकातील ब्रिटिश कादंबरीचा मोठा प्रभाव होता, तो कथा, कादंबरी या वाङ्मय प्रकारासाठी वास्तववादाकडे जवळजवळ पूर्णपणे  वळला होता. जसा बहुजन लेखक त्याकाळानंतर हळूहळू लिहता झाला तो अल्पजनांप्रमाणे वास्तववाद अंगीकारूनच. विलास सारंग म्हणतात: "...स्वातंत्र्यपूर्व धुरीण पिढीने कवटाळलेले ध्येयवाद, सुधारणावाद १९६० नंतरच्या बहुजन लेखकांनी सब-कॉन्शस अनुकरणप्रियतेने स्वीकारलेला दिसतो. काही नवीन वैचारिक मार्ग शोधण्याचा प्रयत्न क्वचितच आढळतो..." (पृष्ठ ६६, 'वाङ्मयीन संस्कृती व सामाजिक वास्तव', २०११)

माझ्या मते बहुजन साहित्यिकांना वेगळा, कधी पूरक- समांतर तर कधी काटकोनात (orthogonal) असा पंथ धरता आला असता.  त्यांच्यावर शतकानुशतक झालेला अन्याय, त्यातून निर्माण झालेला आक्रोश  किमान काही लेखकांना तरी विडंबन (satire) , अद्भुत (फँटसी), फार्स सारख्या साहित्य प्रकारातून (genre) अतिशय मनोरंजक आणि प्रभावी प्रकारे व्यक्त करता आला असता: उदा: जोनाथन स्विफ्ट यांची 'ए मॉडेस्ट प्रपोजल', १७२९ किंवा मिखाईल बल्गाकॉव्ह यांची 'दी मास्टर अँड मार्गारिटा', १९२८-१९४०.

महाराष्ट्रातले समाजसुधारक प्रखर वास्तव साध्या (ज्योतिराव फुले तर कधीतरी अतिशय लालित्यपूर्ण) मराठी भाषेत १९व्या शतकापासून मांडतच होते.  श्रीपाद कृष्ण कोल्हटकरांनी विडंबनाची ताकत समर्थपणे दाखवून दिली होती. अण्णासाहेब  किर्लोस्करांचा 'संगीत सौभद्र' नावाचा फार्स  कमालीचा लोकप्रिय झाला होता. मराठीत केंव्हाच अनुवादित झालेल 'अरेबियन नाईट्स' सारख उत्तम दर्जाच फँटसी वाङ्मय उपलब्ध होत. प्रखर वास्तव, अतिवास्तव आणि फँटसी यांच्या सीमेवर संचार करणाऱ्या अस्सल देशी जातक कथा होत्या. शील-अश्लील असली दांभिकता धुडकारून देणार, बहुजनांच सामान्य जीवन तरलतेन मांडणार आणि सेलिब्रेट करणार जगातील एक महान पुस्तक 'गाथा सप्तशती' होत....

१९८९सालापर्यंत जरी या रशियन क्रांतीचा जगात इतर अनेक ठिकाणी मुडदा पडला असला तरी मराठी साहित्यावरील तीचा पगडा अजून बऱ्याच प्रमाणात कंटाळवाण्या, कल्पनाशून्य अशा ढोबळ वास्तववादाच्या (आणि ध्येयवाद , आदर्शवाद , परिवर्तनवाद) रूपात कायम आहे. लेखक आणि समाजसुधारक यातील फरक नष्ट झाला आहे... 

पिकासोंच्या चित्रातील सेक्सचा 'वास'!...Nosing Sex in a Picasso!

John Berger (1926-2017), ‘The Success and Failure of Picasso‘, 1965:

“...Today, among the five hundred or more of his own past paintings which Picasso owns, over fifty are of Marie-Thérèse. No other person dominates his collection a quarter as much. When he paints her, her subject is always able to withstand the pressure of his way of painting. This is because he is single-minded about her, and can see her as the most direct manifestation of his own feelings. He paints her like a Venus, but a Venus such as nobody else has ever painted.

What makes these paintings different is the degree of their direct sexuality. They refer without any ambiguity at all to the experience of making love to this woman. They describe sensations and, above all, the sensation of sexual comfort. Even when she is dressed or with her daughter (the daughter of Marie-Thérèse and Picasso was born in 1935) she is seen in the same way: soft as a cloud, easy, full of precise pleasures, and inexhaustible because alive and sentient. In literature the thrall which a particular woman’s body can have over a man has been described often. But words are abstract and can hide as much as they state. A visual image can reveal far more naturally the sweet mechanism of sex. One need only think of a drawing of a breast and then compare it to all the stray associations of the word, to see how this is so. At its most fundamental there aren’t any words for sex – only noises: yet there are shapes...”

 
The Guardian reported on January 30 2017: “Tate Modern to host 'once in a lifetime' Picasso (1881-1973) exhibition. Landmark show will focus on ‘year of wonders’ 1932, at height of painter’s affair with young lover Marie-Thérèse Walter (1909-1977).”

In a delightful comedy "The Curse of the Jade Scorpion", 2001, Woody Allen plays an insurance investigator and cracks the case of a missing Picasso.

He explains succinctly how difficult the operation was: 
"...I'm supposed to be looking for a picture of a woman with a guitar, but it's all little cubes. It took me two hours to find the nose."

courtesy: DreamWorks Pictures

Therefore,  imagine the  degree of difficulty in finding sex in the following picture!

Le Rêve / The Dream (1932), painting by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

courtesy: Wikipedia

John Richardson comes to the rescue writing in his 'A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932', 2007:

“...Emptied of rage, Picasso is at his most loving in the second of these three allegories, Sleep (Le Sommeil) which depicts Marie-Thérèse naked and asleep in a friendly armchair. A self-congratulatory inscription on the stretcher—“executed between three and six o’clock on January 23, 1932”—suggests the time frame of one of Marie-Thérèse’s naps. Picasso has wickedly used the circular swoop of the arms and the positioning of his hysterical wife’s head and breasts in Repos to evoke the true repose in this portrayal of his mistress. The next day, Picasso executed the third painting, the celebrated Dream.  The wallpaper pattern, which staggered off the wall in Repose, keeps its place in the Dream, and its darker, denser colors evoke the workings of the subconscious every bit as effectively and much more economically than Dalí. Picasso’s transformation of the dreamer’s thumbs and forefingers into a vaginal image, and her forehead into a penile one, confirms that sex is on her mind as well as between her legs...”

Now,  but for the critic, I would have never known every place the sex was....but I thought there was some amount of objectification of female body in all this and therefore was elated to see the following cartoon that is now almost 70-year-old...

Artist: Whitney Darrow, Jr. (1909-1999), The New Yorker,  May 3 1947

अनेक मूस, दुःस्वप्नमय स्वल्पविराम आणि नेटके मराठी...Kusumagraj@105

Today February 27 2017 is 105th birth anniversary of Kusumagraj (कुसुमाग्रज). It also is "Mararthi Bhasha Din" (मराठी भाषा दिन).

Paul Murphy, ‘True Crime Japan: Thieves, Rascals, Killers and Dope Heads: True Stories From a Japanese Courtroom’, 2016:
“...Part of the problem, especially for a foreigner seeking to understand Japan’s people, is that relaxed conversation is regulated, and usually stymied, by custom and the structure of the language. Almost every sentence carries a status marker: a word, the absence of a word, or a verb ending that indicates whether you are senior, junior, or equal in status to the person you are speaking with. It’s easy in Japan to ask a question that is considered too personal or too familiar and therefore rude..."

On this blog, on May 3 2015, I wrote: "आम्ही नेटकेची ना लिहू...There Is No Such Thing as ‘Proper Marathi'".

But I am ready to live with the propaganda of 'proper Marathi' if some delightful cartoons, like the ones below, were to come out of it.

 Artist: Tom Toro, The New Yorker, May 2016

Artist: Drew Dernavich, The New Yorker,  December 2013

The Essence of Human...A Clockwork Orange's Anthony Burgess@100

Today February 25 2017 is 100th birth anniversary of Anthony Burgess, writer of "A Clockwork Orange", 1962

The Economist, June 1999:

‘“A Clockwork Orange”, from Anthony Burgess's novel, has been a victim of its own violence and tarred with a false reputation for sensationalism. Actually, beneath its violent surface, this challenging film is a philosophical debate on the role of free will. If ultra-violent Alex de Large is surgically altered to make him docile, is he still human? Does the essence of humanity not reside in the right to choose wrong?’

Malcolm McDowell in Stanley Kubrick's ‘A Clockwork Orange’,  1971

courtesy: Warner Bros. and Columbia-Warner Distributors

Artist: David Pelham for Penguin Books UK