now and then

...haven't written anything in a while, simply trying to keep my head above water, as it were. Been concentrating on Dostoevsky and Pasternak so far this year,Pasternak's poetry to be more precise.Russian novelists have such grand designs,Feodor D always reaching for the grey to colorize ,Pasternak going back to childhood,to wonder.Sigh. His verse can be so seemingly obtuse, no wonder Stalin reportedly said"leave the Cloud Dweller alone." when he woke up one day and decided to whack half of the writers in the country.What a sad, strange wonderful country Russia is!Sad because its history is so replete with leaders who were either incompetent or corrupt or deranged,or all three.sigh. I have such a deep love of the people there, their openness, their love of literature of talk of chess and tea. I know so much of this has changed in the last 20 years,though I wonder if these things are not genetic/environmental somehow...been reading a great deal on the Russian/German battles of WWII.I am no buff of war, i usually read the poets to find out what was going on during any given time. However, since so much of history is constantly re-written[even in the USA,I'm afraid]it's good to see other viewpoints.The Russian losses in WWII are beyond comprehension.The Germans behaved demonically on their way into Russia, and the Soviets paid them back.Of course the civilian populations were the victims.The women of Berlin, dear God,rape as a means of subjugation !The diary a woman in Berlin and the film are so difficult to read and watch because the suffering is so continual.Does the fact that the diarist was FASCIST make her victim hood any less painful? Did the fact that the Ukrainians and Belorussians not support the Soviets make their suffering any less intense by the Germans?War by decimation. Has the world yet recovered from it?