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'The Dragons of Expectation': A poet looks at the world from his other, political perspective
2005
Overview
[Robert Conquest] himself is one of those few. Though best known as a historian -- author of \"The Harvest of Sorrow\" and \"The Great Terror,\" seminal works of Soviet history -- he is also a poet of some renown, a founding member in the 1950s, along with D.J. Enright, Philip Larkin, Donald Davie and Thom Gunn, of the group of British poets known as the Movement. He has translated Lamartine and Rimbaud from the French and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's epic \"Prussian Nights\" from the Russian. The epilogue to \"The Dragons of Expectation\" is in fact a poem, a very good poem, called \"Reconnaissance.\" As for his political experience, after serving in World War II -- prior to which he had backpacked through the Soviet Union -- Conquest joined the British foreign service and was attached to the British Embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria. He \"saw the whole process of Stalinist takeover. ... Even those of us who had originally thought better of the Soviet occupiers ... were completely disenchanted.\" Conquest also served briefly as a first secretary to the United Kingdom's delegation to the United Nations. So, in the final section, \"Harp Song of the Humanities,\" he focuses on how \"the corporatist, bureaucratic, and etatist trends that we have noted on the political side can also be seen ... in the arts.\" He cites some interesting figures. In 1998, 1.6 million people in this country identified themselves as artists. An additional 1.3 million were engaged in some kind of artistic production. \"One of the implicit errors in all this,\" Conquest writes, \"is the idea that the more contributors to art, the better. But if the numbers are too large, the result is not so good. If a hundred qualified for the last round of a skiing event, it would be ruined. ...\"
Publisher
Tribune Content Agency LLC
Subject
