FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

I was in France at New Year and,  thanks to the foul weather that made walking almost impossible, found that I had spare time on my hands; so  I wrote a short and romantic story to send off to the Choc-Lit short story competition where they were soliciting stories in which chocolate featured as a central theme. 

I came to know a little about Choc-Lit from Chris Stovell whose compelling debut novel Turning the Tide they published last year.  Choc-Lit writers also publish an Authors Corner blog in which they talk, sometimes about their books and sometimes about other entertaining matters of relevance.

In another life, Chris may have been a sheep dog, for she has been assiduous in rounding up her friends and pointing them in the direction of the Author's Corner, encouraging them to leave comments.  Being of a sheep like disposition I dutifully responded to her instructions and, in what seemed an eye blink, found that a comment I had left (about mice, as it turned out) had won me a book.

If I could win a book for a comment then who knows what I might win for a short romantic New Year story about a lugubrious Russian, (I think it right to stress the 'might' for I have never ever had any success with such competitions, but they are fun to enter all the same), with a practical fondness for chocolate.

The lugubrious Russian in my story was not the person in the picture, though he might well have possessed similar good looks;  I am sure anyway that Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, the great Russian poet, whose picture* it is, wouldn't really mind.  He is quite handsome after all, don't you think? (and the story is a romantic one), though if it were left to me I should be inclined to advise him to shave the whiskers.  Anyway they like sharing pictures of handsome young men on the Choc-Lit blog to whom I offer the image if ever there should be a lack of hot talent from the present era.

As well as being handsome Pushkin was a romantic.  Indeed, he becomes even more romantic when you know that he was fiercely addicted to duels. For he was both a duellist and a poet.  I put the duellist first because he almost fought more duels - twenty-nine in all - than he wrote poems.  Most of the time he was lucky (I daresay he was a very good duellist) but one hundred and seventy five years ago - almost to this very day (10 February 1837 to be precise) - his luck deserted him and he was killed by the French officer he had challenged, leaving literature bereft because, if he was a good duellist, then he was certainly an even better poet and writing the poems and plays and novels which he turned out seemingly without effort from his St Petersburg desk is a more rewarding activity than duelling (and getting yourself killed). 

As a teenager I was as lugubrious and full of depression as the Russian in my story, wrote a deal of very bad abstract poetry and consoled myself by reading the great Russian authors - Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and the like.  Then, when we were told that we could only spend two thirds of our school time studying for 'A' Levels and we had to spend the rest being 'educated,' I opted for a Russian class.  They threw us in at the deep end and we found ourselves translating, before even mastering the Cyrillic alphabet, Pushkin's famous poem that begins 'I Loved You.'

                I loved you; even now I must confess,

                       Some embers of my love their fire retain;

                       But do not let it cause you more distress,

                      I do not want to sadden you again.

                     Hopeless and tongue-tied, yet I loved you dearly

                    With pangs the jealous and the timid only know;

                     So tenderly I love you, so sincerely,

                   I pray God grant another love you so.

I regret I do not know who translated this; certainly it wasn't me for I stumbled badly in that class and left it after a term, thinking that Russians were much better when rendered in English by competent persons.  But I went on loving this poem and keeping a nostalgic and romantic perspective on nineteenth century Russia, reinforced, of course, just at the time when it might have been waning by the absurdly romantic film of  Dr Zhivago.

I happened to be in Germany when that film came out and watched it, dubbed into German, in Hannover.  Then I caught a train that rumbled across Europe to catch a midnight boat from Calais, disgorging its weary and sleep deprived passengers on to the Victoria station concourse early the following morning. I breakfasted with someone I had met on the train and as Dr Zhivago was playing opposite the station and both of us had a few hours to kill, saw the film again.  It all seemed remarkably romantic at the time. 

*The picture of Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin painted by Vasily Tropinin is courtesy of Wikipedia.