An Irishman's Diary

IT USED TO BE SAID that Russia’s two greatest military figures were “General January” and “General February”. And yet I find that neither month featured in the famous campaign whose bicentenary falls this year. On the contrary, Napoleon’s invasion began in the summer of 1812 and had largely ended by autumn.

He launched it on June 23rd; won a Pyrrhic victory at Borodino in early September; and a week later was occupying Moscow. Unfortunately for him, the tactical Russian retreat, combined with the burning of crops and finally of the city itself, left nothing worth occupying. Instead, the soon-to-starve Grande Armée embarked on its terrible homeward journey, in what was still only the start of winter.

General October played a supporting role in events. But it was General November who had taken charge when the French crossed the Berezina river, amid terrible losses. By December, the invaders had been completely expelled, with hardly one in 20 of the original 600,000 still standing. In the defence of Russian soil, it had not been necessary to call either January or February into action.

Similarly, when the Nazis invaded 129 years later, their campaign was in trouble long before Christmas. They began their attack a day earlier than Napoleon, but that still wasn’t early enough. By November, their troops already

exhausted, German generals were belatedly re-reading Armand de Caulaincourt’s grim account of the 1812 campaign, wondering where they too had gone wrong.

SUCH IS the fame of the Russian winter as a whole, however, that I find merely contemplating it from a safe distance can help one through the mild Irish version. During the long nights of this time of year, therefore, I can often be found engrossed in a novel by Dostoevsky or Turgenev or Gorky, vicariously enjoying – in particular – their descriptions of the weather.

So it was over New Year, when I was knee-deep in And Quiet Flows the Don. Mikhail Sholokhov's epic about life among the Cossacks, from about 1912 to the Russian revolution and its aftermath, has been compared with War and Peace (which of course revolves around the Napoleonic invasion). And it occurred to me while reading it that, what with the pending bicentenary, this might be the time for another attempt on Tolstoy's sprawling masterpiece, begun but abandoned many years ago.

I was still a teenager then and it was the summer holidays. Thus I emulated Napoleon by embarking on my would-be conquest of the book in late June. By mid-July, I was still confident of reaching the end, although concerned by the slow progress.

Then, gradually, the vastness of the plot, the multiplicity of characters, and the impenetrable density of Constance Garnett’s translation began to sap my energies.

By August, I was fatally bogged down. Although I had reached page 1,047 – the milestone is indelibly etched in memory – the epilogue was still nowhere to be seen. Moscow was burned out by then, and so was I. Admitting defeat, I returned the book to the library. That's why I'm not going to make the mistake of rushing into another War and Peacecampaign. The tentative plan is to start reading it in March. If all goes well, I hope to have reached the outskirts of the epilogue by July.

MOVING FROM Russian literature to music, meanwhile, lovers of the latter may find the National Concert Hall worth a visit tomorrow night when it hosts an evening devoted to Dimitri Tiomkin, the prolific film composer. Born in Ukraine in 1894, Tiomkin studied at the St Petersburg Conservatory, where his contemporaries included Prokofiev, whose Troikais one of the quintessential soundtracks of Christmas and winter and snow.

But Tiomkin’s life was to have a twist as dramatic as anything in the many films he scored. While a young man in 1920, he took part in a lavish third-anniversary reenactment of the storming of Petrograd’s Winter Palace. Thereafter, he decided the revolution was not compatible with his musical career. Instead he moved to Berlin, and Paris, and then New York, until the Wall Street Crash propelled him even further west, to Hollywood.

His first big break was collaborating with Frank Capra on a series of films that would include I t's a Wonderful Life. His second was when he wrote the soundtrack for High Noon(1952), winning two academy awards in the process: best score and best song. In fact, Tiomkin's music may have saved the film, which had previewed to a critical panning, so that the studio hesitated to release it until the theme-tune became a hit independently.

At his career's height, Tiomkin was the go-to music man for a range of directors from Hitchcock to Huston, covering many musical genres. But it was westerns for which he was most famous. As well as High Noon, his scores included Gunfight at the OK Corral, Rio Bravo, and The Alamo; while, for television, he also wrote the most famous cowboy theme of all: Rawhide.

It’s one of those quirks of musical history that the soundtrack of America’s west was written by a Ukrainian jew. Even so, it’s not without logic, as the man himself acknowledged. Both countries were vast, and there was little enough difference between the prairies and the steppes. When you boiled it down, Tiomkin wrote, “the problems of the cowboy and the Cossack are very similar”.

The National Concert Hall presents

Symphonic Hollywood – the Film Music of Dimitri Tiomkin

, performed by the RTE Concert Orchestra and conducted by Richard Kaufman, tomorrow at 8pm.