
Stalin's Poetry - imwm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin%27s_poetry
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cafard
Oh, and if you look in the right library, you may be able to find a copy of
Mussolini's novel _The Cardinal 's Mistress_. I have not myself ever seen a
copy, but heard of it in a review.

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logicchains
Marx wrote poems too:
[https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1837-pre/verse/](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1837-pre/verse/).

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claudiawerner
It's funny that Marx is remembered as the author of one, maybe two books, yet
he wrote thousands of chapters, unpublished manuscripts, poetry, journalism
for European and American papers, polemics etc. - and some of that is still in
the process of being translated into English. Some of his most important work
wasn't translated from German until the 1970s.

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HNLurker2
Hitler a painter and Stalin a poet. What can I say?

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neonate
While we're at it, here's Mao's:
[https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-
work...](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-
works/poems/index.htm)

~~~
runeblaze
My thought when I was reading one of these in class (in China) was that Cao
Cao's poetry seemed quite a bit better. It was quite a dissonance. Mao's
poetry seemed (even to the fairly uneducated me) less artistic than those by
Li Bai or Guo Moruo, but they were reasonably well-crafted. The classical form
did not help either. It was as if seeing Roosevelt writing poetry in the style
of Ovid.

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bigpumpkin
"Though the Tortoise Lives Long

Though the tortoise blessed with magic powers lives long, Its days have their
allotted span;

Though winged serpents ride high on the mist, They turn to dust and ashes at
the last;

An old war-horse may be stabled, Yet still it longs to gallop a thousand li;

And a noble-hearted man though advanced in years Never abandons his proud
aspirations.

Man's span of life, whether long or short, Depends not on Heaven alone;

One who eats well and keeps cheerful Can live to a great old age.

And so, with joy in my heart, I hum this song."

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DenisM
Mayakovski wrote in a 1927 piece [1] "he'll plow the fields, then write a
poem". I wonder now if this was about Stalin?

I also wonder about odd habits of other great men (great as in "highly
influential"). Is a man with great inspirations but without quirky habits
unrelated to their field doomed to mediocracy?

[1] [https://info.wikireading.ru/228439](https://info.wikireading.ru/228439)

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coldtea
Could just as well be a vision for the "new man/woman" of socialism, which
"he'll plow the fields, then write a poem" (e.g. not just be a mere worker
cog, but a worker + creative intellectual, a whole personality).

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pavlov
Reminds me of a 1960s movie (can’t remember the title) where Peter Sellers
plays an enthusiastic British communist who envisions what life must be like
in the Soviet Union: “In the day, working the corn fields. In the evening,
ballet!”

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imulligan
While he was writing poems, America and the EU were building Empires and the
wealth divide took off...just saying

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coldtea
Well, while he was writing poems,

1) the European colonial powers were losing their empires,

2) the EU wouldn't exist in any form until several years after he died,

3) USSR (in which he was in command for a good chunk of time) was propelled
from a rural provincial power into one of the two global superpowers (who,
among other things, was crucial in defeating the Nazi Germany)

4) he had an iron rule in said USSR, and managed to secure half of Europe (and
half of what is now EU, including half of Germany) for his extended empire

Plus a lot of murders and political power plays...

So, yeah, he was hardly just someone "writing poems" and losing time...

~~~
shadowprofile77
Stalin stopped writing his poems years before the USSR even existed at all.
Before that latter date he had already spent several years as a professional
revolutionary (and in prison camps).

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qwerty456127
Lenin has also written an awesome poem about a meat pie gone missing in the
darkness of the night.

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lostlogin
Have you got a link to that, or a quote? I’ve had a search but can’t find
anything.

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qwerty456127
Here it is:

\---

Во тьме ночной

Пропал пирог мясной.

Пропал бесследно, безвозвратно.

Куда и как девался, непонятно.

\---

In the darkness of the night

A meat pie vanished.

It disappeared tracelessly, irrevocably.

It's a mistery (literally it's ununderstandable, one can have no idea) where
has it gone.

\---

In Russian it rhymes.

Once their mother baked a meat pie meant to be served to the guests and
everybody for a supper and his younger brother ate the entire pie secretly he
didn't tell anybody and wrote this poem.

As far as I know this was the one and only poem Lenin wrote.

~~~
shadowprofile77
I do wonder if it was really his brother who ate it. Lenin was reportedly the
"worst" behaved of his siblings, and though he usually owned up to his
behavior as a kid there was one incident his sister recounted in which he
broke a vase and tried to deny any knowledge of the fact, but then weeks
later, one random night broke down crying to his mother and admitted that he
had lied about the incident. Just an anecdote from a childhood but amusing
when you consider the sheer magnitude of destruction he later deliberately
created as an adult.

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cousin_it
Stalin's poems with illustrations by Hitler: [http://kto-kto.narod.ru/bl-
bl-4/stalin_hitler.html](http://kto-kto.narod.ru/bl-bl-4/stalin_hitler.html)

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kanox
Those are really shitty illustrations.

~~~
lqet
Wikipedia also has an article on Hitler's paintings:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paintings_by_Adolf_Hitler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paintings_by_Adolf_Hitler)

Even the better ones still look odd, like kitschy comics. For lack of a better
description, his paintings completely lack any kind of poetic depth.

edit: the article actually contains a better description by John Gunther:

"They are prosaic, utterly devoid of rhythm, color, feeling, or spiritual
imagination. They are architect's sketches painful and precise draftsmanship;
nothing more. No wonder the Vienna professors told him to go to an
architectural school and give up pure art as hopeless"

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dEnigma
I actually think some of his paintings and sketches look quite good for a
young artist, who hadn't even received proper training yet. There are some
more available on Wikimedia Commons:

[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Paintings_by_Ado...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Paintings_by_Adolf_Hitler)

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pavlov
They really aren’t that bad. Very uneven, but that’s to be expected from a
young person. The few looser paintings like “Klosterruine in Messines” show
promise IMHO, at least compared to the heavy-handed drafting of most of the
watercolors.

This one makes me think that it would be an amazing trolling opportunity to
remove the signature, create high-quality reproductions of this “Mary with
Jesus” and give them out to American Evangelicals, as the art style generally
matches the Christian fundamentalist taste:
[https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HitlerMaryWithJesu...](https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HitlerMaryWithJesus.jpg)

