The mystery of Maxim Litvinov’s adventures in Ireland (Diaries, September 29th and October 2nd) continues to deepen.
I now accept that the future Russian revolutionary did indeed have an apprenticeship here as a commercial traveller, trading in haberdashery or holy pictures or scrap metal, or all of the above, with the likes of Patrick Kavanagh’s family in Inniskeen.
But my thanks are now due to Glenn Johnston – Limerick-born, New York-based Joycean – who has drawn my attention to a passage from the memoirs of Sylvia Beach, publisher of Ulysses, where she recalled famous visitors to her Paris bookshop during the 1920s.
“The whole Litvinov family also visited . . . " she wrote. “Mrs Litvinov was English, and her husband [soon then to become Stalin’s foreign minister] was almost an Irishman, since he had attended the same university as Joyce in Dublin.”
Rocky Road to Russia – Frank McNally with more about Maxim Litvinov, the Cobblestone bar on tour, and the Battle of Balaclava
Red lines – Frank McNally on the little-known story of an Irish translator in 1920s Moscow
Litvinoff the land – Frank McNally with more on a Russian revolutionary’s Irish past
A matter of perspective – Colm Keena on lessons from a trip to Vietnam
Can this also be true? It isn’t mentioned in any biographies I’ve found.
And I wonder how Litvinov would have fitted a college course in during his busy time as a subversive exile from Tsarist Russia, when he was buying guns, organising bank robberies, and selling trinkets door-to-door.
On a separate issue, the idea of visiting Sylvia Beach’s shop probably came from Ivy Litvinov (née Low), his wife, a big fan of Ulysses. “I still cannot think without emotion (or speak without tears),” she wrote of reading it. “I now feel afraid to pick the book up, as if it were a bomb that might go off.”
I don’t know if her husband was similarly enthused by the book.
Either way, he may at least have had an affinity with its mythological inspiration.
An “intimate study” of Litvinov published in the US in 1931 didn’t mention the years in Ireland but praised his readiness to engage with “enemies of the proletariat” in the west, unlike his more purist colleagues in Moscow. The writer summed this up, cryptically: “He is one of the men who would prefer the Odyssey to the Iliad.”
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Speaking of old soldiers returning from the war, I met a real one at the Korean National Day reception on Wednesday evening. His name is Jimmy Doyle. He’s from Dún Laoghaire. And over 70 years ago now, he was part of the UN force sent to Korea to repel the Soviet-backed invasion from the north.
He still carries a bit of that country with him everywhere: a walking stick given to him by locals after he was wounded in the leg.
With the help of this, he’s still standing at 92 and, like the best old soldiers, has no plans to die anytime soon. “I’ll make the hundred,” he told The Irish Times.
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Heroically tearing myself away from the Koreans’ free bar later, I cycled across town to catch the second half of a Dublin History Festival talk in the back room of Smithfield’s Cobblestone Bar.
This involved more Russian history: courtesy of Ireland’s former (Derry)man in Moscow, Jim Sharkey, who reviewed 50 years of Irish/Russian diplomatic relations in conversation with Tommy Graham.
Very interesting it was too.
But the Cobblestone is more famous for music than talking. So afterwards, I peeped into the front room where, sure enough, there was a mass session in progress, overlooked by wall signs that warned loquacious drinkers: “Listening area. Respect the musicians”.
There was a strange sense of déja vu. For the last pub I had peeped into – McNello’s in Inniskeen on Saturday night, before driving back to Dublin from the Patrick Kavanagh festival – also had a Cobblestone session.
Musicians from the Smithfield pub had travelled up to Monaghan on a pilgrimage/outreach project. For one night only, they transformed the area into Cobblestony Grey Soil.
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The back room of that Dublin pub is synonymous normally not just with music but with something called the “balaclava sessions”.
This is not as sinister as it sounds.
Participants don’t wear anonymising headgear: it’s just a metaphor for the absence of an audience, allowing novice musicians to play free from pressure until they’re confident enough to move to the front room.
But I’m reminded that this month marks the 170th anniversary of the Battle of Balaclava, which gave us the name of the headgear and bequeathed several other phrases to the English language.
Part of the Crimean War, it included the infamous Charge of the Light Brigade, the less well known Charge of the Heavy Brigade, and the “Thin Red Line”.
It also inspired a much-quoted French phrase, uttered by the astonished Gen Pierre Bosquet as he viewed the Light Brigade’s mad heroics: “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre” (“It’s magnificent but it is not war”).
And it immortalised the name of the British commander generally held responsible for the disastrous charge.
Even before that, he had been noted for his absent-minded habit of referring to the Russian enemy as “The French”.
Then he died, only months later aged 66, partly from the stresses of the Siege of Sevastopol, for which he was also much criticised.
Despite all of which, he was soon commemorated on a Dublin street-sign. It is therefore in part to him, indirectly, that we owe the much-loved ballad Raglan Road.