Poetry remained a part of Stalin's life right up to and even during his three decades as tyrant, leading him to protect some poets and destroy others.Ĭhavchavadze, Stalin's patron, was a Georgian aristocrat, literary aesthete and respected writer, a romantic believer in an independent Georgia ruled by an enlightened nobility. The poems' romantic imagery is derivative, but their beauty lies in the rhythm and language. Here, he showed a certain talent in another craft that might have provided an alternative to politics: "One might even find reasons not purely political for regretting Stalin's switch from poetry to revolution," suggests Professor Donald Rayfield, who has translated the poems into English. Stalin's singing - he was a lead adolescent tenor at the seminary - was said to be good enough for him to go professional. Perhaps they are closer in standard to Churchill's prose style. The poems do not fit into the category of Hitler's badly drawn postcards.
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