When I approached the reader and started telling her about my blog, she thought I'd said Blok, as in the Russian poet, Alexander Alexandrovitch Blok (in Russian the ends of words are always "unvoiced" so the /g/ sounded to her like a /k/). Appropriately, she was reading Russian poetry, though not Blok--Osip Mandelshtam. She said that Mandelshtam made two mistakes in his life. The first was being born Jewish and the second was writing a poem wich compared Stalin's moustache to a pair of cockroaches. The poem got him arrested and later (quoting Wikipedia) he achieved self-fulfilment of his own prophecy:
"Only in Russia poetry is respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?"
From Stalin Epigraph:...His fat fingers are slimy like slugs,
And his words are absolute, like grocers' weights.
His cockroach whiskers are laughing...
the whole poem can be found on Wikipedia
The book was a gift from her students--would have loved to learn more, but we were on the bus and we'd just gotten to our stop. If you happened to catch the address, please leave a comment. Thanks!
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