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Old Friends And Assorted Tsars
Jan. 22nd, 2022 10:19 amThere was a song I liked when I was twenty ("Old Friends", Simon and Garfunkel) which contains the line "How terribly strange to be seventy"- and it was all about how weird and pathetic old people are. It also contained the line "Me'ries- that's all that's left you now".
Well, balls to that!
I was seventy one yesterday. I feel weird enough- because life is weird- but I hope I'm not pathetic. As for "mem'ries"- I refuse to dwell on them. They're stored on a cloud somewhere- safe enough- but most of them have little relevance to who I am now.
I suppose I was a bit of a sentimentalist when I was twenty. And Simon and Garfunkel fed that mind-set. I'm much less of one now.
And I find Simon and Garfunkel a bit glutinous...
Change of subject.
I've been looking at 19th century Russian history- very superficially- in order to fill in some of the background to War and Peace. Here's something I didn't know (or hadn't put together): In the course of a little over 100 years three Russian tsars came to sticky ends. Paul I was butchered by disenchanted courtiers, Alexander II was eviscarated by a revolutionary bomb and Nicholas II was machine-gunned in a cellar along with all his family. No wonder Stalin- tsar in all but name- got to be very very paranoid.
And here's a fascinating tit-bit- a 19th century conspiracy theory. It concerns Alexander I- the tsar who features in War and Peace- who died of typhus at a relatively young age. But just suppose he faked his death (and God knows, who would want to be tsar of all the Russias?) and lived the rest of his life as a Siberian holy man. There's supporting evidence. The chap he's supposed to have become- whose past was a mystery and whose manners were refined- was called Fr Kuzmich and he's relatively well documented. A graphologist took a look at his handwriting and said it was identical to the tsar's. I'd love this story to be true. There was talk of digging him up and doing DNA tests, but so far as I know this hasn't happened yet.
Well, balls to that!
I was seventy one yesterday. I feel weird enough- because life is weird- but I hope I'm not pathetic. As for "mem'ries"- I refuse to dwell on them. They're stored on a cloud somewhere- safe enough- but most of them have little relevance to who I am now.
I suppose I was a bit of a sentimentalist when I was twenty. And Simon and Garfunkel fed that mind-set. I'm much less of one now.
And I find Simon and Garfunkel a bit glutinous...
Change of subject.
I've been looking at 19th century Russian history- very superficially- in order to fill in some of the background to War and Peace. Here's something I didn't know (or hadn't put together): In the course of a little over 100 years three Russian tsars came to sticky ends. Paul I was butchered by disenchanted courtiers, Alexander II was eviscarated by a revolutionary bomb and Nicholas II was machine-gunned in a cellar along with all his family. No wonder Stalin- tsar in all but name- got to be very very paranoid.
And here's a fascinating tit-bit- a 19th century conspiracy theory. It concerns Alexander I- the tsar who features in War and Peace- who died of typhus at a relatively young age. But just suppose he faked his death (and God knows, who would want to be tsar of all the Russias?) and lived the rest of his life as a Siberian holy man. There's supporting evidence. The chap he's supposed to have become- whose past was a mystery and whose manners were refined- was called Fr Kuzmich and he's relatively well documented. A graphologist took a look at his handwriting and said it was identical to the tsar's. I'd love this story to be true. There was talk of digging him up and doing DNA tests, but so far as I know this hasn't happened yet.
