Intro

On August 12, 2000, the Russian nuclear-powered submarine Kursk sunk after a mysterious accident in the Barents Sea. 200 or close to 200 sailors were reported, as far as the Russians authorities do any reporting, trapped inside and clanging or making various desperate noises to signal that they were, or some of them were, still alive. The submarine was damaged in a way that prevented it from surfacing again. The oxygen was running out. It followed a week of international agony, speculation, sentimentality, and bad taste (among other things, the Kursk was misread "Kurst").

The English Government volunteered to send help but it would take almost a week before reaching the point of the catastrophe. Russian authorities, who, of course, had delayed some days before broadcasting the news, did not take up this offer immediately; without providing further explanation, they said that there was enough oxygen to last until August 25. Since the vessel was supplied with emergency oxygen for each crew member for five days, this estimate might be based on assumptions of the number of sailors already presumed dead (by then, any hope of finding anybody alive was to be reckoned wishful thinking).

Later on, a Norwegian taskforce was able, or allowed, to penetrate the Kursk. It was reported that some 28 sailors had indeed endured a protracted agony in the dark, surviving for days in a pocket of air. Some of them had made the quite moving effort to address letters to their family...

On the piers, even before the finding had taken place, heart-breaking scenes had been allowed to appear on the Russian TV. A mother was crying and insulting President Putin, who was still absent. Everybody could see how the woman was suddenly surrounded by some policemen and how one of the policemen jabbed her in the forearm with some substance.

Eventually Putin did appear in public, apologising and regretting. Not long before, he had been "enthroned" in the Presidential seat, after a sumptuous ceremony performed in a Russian Orthodox cathedral with full czarist pomp. In that occasion he even met the English Prime Minister Tony Blair, and declared that he was going to pick up the English language and study one hour a day while being driven around.

This having to learn the English language, for a man who formerly belonged, most likely than not, to the KGB, is Russian high jinx.

All of what I mentioned up to now are points of relevance between the present time, "la morta stagione", and Anthony Burgess’s novel Honey for the Bears.

The Kursk had been built in St Petersburg - a town renamed Petrograd in 1914 and Leningrad in 1924 (as it was still called at the time of Anthony’s visit) - and the novel plays in the same location. Anthony’s Russian translator, Dmitri Chekalov, warned me that Petrograd stand for St Peter, and not Peter the Great, so that Petersburg is a sort of Easter Rome. There is a joke in the book: "You are grad, and upon this grad…" "You are peter [a stone], and upon this peter…."

 

Back in 1961, Anthony and his then wife Llynn left for a trip to Russia which was meant to be partly vacation partly small time business. Rumours circulated in Europe in those years that in USSR there was a tremendous desire for consumer goods and that every visitor was besieged by Russians imploring to be sold clothes, glasses, stockings (many items being actually worn by the visitors), but above all nylon dresses, nylon stockings and blue jeans, which in that country were unavailable, Communist or Socialist civilisation not being - and rightly so perhaps we may sigh now, choked as we are by goodies - a consumer one.

The trip was thus planned as a self-paying holiday, which would start by boarding a Russian ship that would sail from Tilbury to Leningrad "calling at Copenhagen and Stockholm, and then sailing back, calling at Stockholm and Copenhagen with Helsinki added."

Later in his life Anthony, in his desire to refrain from delivering "messages" (popular at the time), would quote favourably one of the French theories of art as a form of bricolage, and here we have an example of a maximum of bricolage, since apart from proposing to sell his two suitcases of polyester shift dresses bought at Marks and Spencer’s of Tunbridge Wells for thirty shillings apiece, he started to relearn Russian. By trying to teach his wife the Cyrillic alphabet for the most elementary needs - such as TUALET, and "sweeteners of social intercourse" such as "good morning" -, he stumbled into the solution of what to use for his intended A Clockwork Orange: instead of a short-lived real slang, he devised a vocabulary that would be "a mixture of Russian and demotic English, seasoned with rhyming slang and the gipsy’s bolo".

"I ended up with a Russian loanword vocabulary of around two hundred words. As the book was about brainwashing, it was appropriate that the text itself should be a brainwashing device."

Later on, in his second part of his memoirs, YOU’VE HAD YOUR TIME, Anthony was to inform us, breezily, that "the novel was nearly finished by the time… we were… to board the Alexander Raishchev".

The couple spent the night at the Hotel Russell, where Llynn collapsed during dinner and then again on the Fenchurch Street station on their slow journey to Tilbury.

 

When I was in St Petersburg last on September 1^st, 2000, I happened to ask myself what Anthony would think - and write - about today's Russia. Imagine Coleridge offered a return ticket to Xanadu!

 

The Kursk tragedy was shoking enough, but it was not the only tragedy in that summer. Moscow Ostankino Television Tower, the largest structure of its kind in Europe (Ostankino broadcasts 30 TV and radio stations), caught mysteriously fire and was threatening to collapse, creating a nightmarish havoc. Most television screens in Moscow remained blank, and also a number of radio stations, including Radio Ekho Moskvy, went off the air or were disturbed. Firemen struggled against the fire amid fears that the 540-metre structure could collapse. Finally, after close to a week of using all the technical resources available and throwing in some human lives, the tower was rescued.

But this was happening in Moscow, the far away Russian capital, which is not particularly fond of St Petersburg and its inhabitants. I wonder whether there is some tie between the two events. (The media had been accused by Putin to be run by the Mafia.)

The image of the elderly mother on the quay, crying without restraint and shaking her fists openly at Putin because he was not here, was an unexpected shoker. This woman was angry like all the people (a good many of them from St Petersburg) who had turned down with indignation the proposal, advanced by some unanimous authority, of a mass sea burial, with floating wreaths of flowers. They wanted the bodies of their sons, brothers, and spouses recovered.

Later in the same year, on Saturday, 25^th of November, Somerset House in London opened a wing to an exhibition of the Hermitage devoted to some of the treasures of Catherine the Great. It will run for ten years before being rotated to some other town in other countries and receive some more treasures...

What can I say about St Petersburg? It is - and remains - a wonderful spot - despite of everything. I saw the incredibly moving monument that the city has put up to its own dead out of its own pocket - no doubt: it is the most beautiful war monument I have ever seen. And in the Summer Residence, where Alexander Pushkin lived, and where the Nazis put up their quarters during World War II, I saw the incredible restoration work, which still goes on today, and which has been carried out by the Russian people from that part of the country in the last half century, uninterruptedly. And I felt unbelievably humble and thankful.

To those people, this "running commentary" is dedicated.

                                                                 © Liana Burgess

Part One 1-3

Email: francobrain@angelfire.com.