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Pre-leadership Leader of the Soviet Union Political ideology Works
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Before he became aBolshevik revolutionary and leader of theSoviet Union,Joseph Stalin was a promising poet.
Like many Georgian children, Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili – who would later call himself Stalin – grew up with the national epic,The Knight in the Panther's Skin. As a child, Jughashvili knew the poem by heart and passionately read the other popular poems of the time, notably those byRaphael Eristavi,Akaki Tsereteli and – once he learned Russian –Nikolay Nekrasov.[1]
At the Orthodox Seminary ofTiflis, where he was enrolled beginning in 1894, Jughashvili readGoethe andShakespeare in translation, and could reciteWalt Whitman. He also started writingRomantic poetry in Georgian. In 1895, at the age of 17, Jughashvili's work impressed the noted poetIlia Chavchavadze, who published five of them in his journal,Iveria, attributed to the pseudonymSoselo.[1]
One of these poems, "Morning" (dedicated to PrinceRaphael Eristavi[1]), begins:
Once Jughashvili entered revolutionary politics, and became Stalin, he stopped writing poetry regularly, telling a friend it took too much time.
In 1907 he used his prestige asSoselo to obtain information from an admirer needed for a bank robbery. During theGreat Purge, he edited a Russian translation of theKnight in the Panther's Skin (by a Georgian intellectual he released from prison for that purpose) and competently translated some of the couplets himself.[1]
Stalin published all of his work anonymously and never publicly acknowledged it. WhenLavrentiy Beria secretly hadBoris Pasternak and other noted translators prepare a Russian edition of Stalin's poems for the ruler's 70th birthday in 1949, Stalin had the project stopped.[1]
In his biography of Stalin,Simon Sebag Montefiore notes that the poems inIveria "were widely read and much admired. They became minor Georgian classics, to be published in anthologies and memorised by schoolchildren until the 1970s (and not as part ofStalin's cult; they were usually published as 'Anonymous')." Montefiore adds that "their romantic imagery was derivative but their beauty lay in the delicacy and purity of rhyme and language".[1]
Robert Service, another Stalin biographer, describes the poems as "fairly standard for early 19th-century Romantic poetry", and as "very conventional, ... very standardized and rather self-indulgent".[2]
Stalin's poems have been translated into English byDonald Rayfield.[1]
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