Wars and peace: Doctor Zhivago is at the centre of Dean Parker?s play set in Russia at the onset of the Cold War and New Zealander Paddy Costello?s ties to communism.
In?1949 the First Secretary at the New Zealand Legation in Moscow, Paddy Costello, was visiting the Russian poet (and subsequent author of Doctor Zhivago) Boris Pasternak when Pasternak was called away to the phone.
According to James McNeish's enthralling 2007 biography of Costello, The Sixth Man, Costello related how his stunned host "returned after some minutes white-faced, in a state of shock, saying, ?That was Stalin. He says he is writing a poem. He wanted my advice'."
Costello sounds a corker bloke. Born 1912, raised in a grocery in Ponsonby not far from where I live, then on to Auckland Grammar and Auckland Uni, brilliant linguist and classicist, scholarship to Cambridge 1932, joined Communist Party 1935, met and within three weeks married fellow comrade Bella Lerner, Long Range Desert Group during the war, right-hand man to General Freyberg, renowned for pitch-perfect ballads sung at booze-ups, career diplomat until 1954, then let go after suspicion of being a Soviet agent. Died 1964 (heart attack). A quick and sensational life.
What stands out, of course, is suspicion of being a Soviet agent.
In 1954 two atom bomb spies working for the Russians arrived in Paris from the United States and were issued with New Zealand passports under the false names Peter and Helen Kroger. This enabled them to enter Britain and set up shop until arrested in 1961.
When The Mitrokhin Archive - a cache of documents smuggled out of Russia by a senior officer of the Soviet Foreign Intelligence service - was published in 1999, it revealed that a list of the Paris KGB's "particularly valuable agents" in 1953 included an agent at the New Zealand consulate code-named "LONG". This was 6ft 2in Paddy Costello whom, the Archive claimed, issued the Krogers with their kiwi passports.
McLeish's biography coolly and forensically demolishes the claim that Costello issued the Krogers' passports. The passport applications were taken by another member of the consulate, Doug Zohrab, and signed off by the Charge d'Affaires, Jean McKenzie.
Of course proving Costello had no hand in the issuing of the Krogers' passports is one thing, proving he wasn't a Soviet agent code-named LONG entirely another. The term "agent" presumably covered a multitude of dealings. Costello had an Irish background, learnt Irish, would have seen the Union Jack as a butcher's apron and the Empire a racket where Britain waived the rules, would have had no compunction in passing on to anyone anything and everything he was privy to about London's continued meddling in, say, the Middle East pre-Suez. I would have done the same.
But he loved his family, admired and was loyal (in his own way) to his wife, didn't exploit or oppress anyone, liked a drop and sang at parties. He was "unforgettably good company" according to his mate and fellow son of Irish immigrants the wonderful Southland novelist and short story writer Dan Davin, "an unscrupulous arguer, the subject of countless stories, a man who could make any occasion come alive". Who cares if he was a Russian spy? I've noticed women don't. Women have a much more honest and personal view of what constitutes treachery. It's only blokes who care about whether or not he was a spy.
When I wrote Midnight in Moscow (opening at the Maidment Theatre in Auckland in April, then in a second production at Circa in Wellington in May), I had Costello in mind as I fashioned one of the characters, Hugh Toomey.
The play takes place in the Russian capital in 1947, right at the onset of the cold war.
It's a play of four acts, standard Chekhov.
Three of the acts are set inside the New Zealand Legation where there's a line-up of entertaining and hard-drinking figures from the foreign service.
The remaining act, occurring in the first half, is set among the pine trees and cucumber patch of Boris Pasternak's dacha in Peredelkino, a leafy riverside retreat outside Moscow.
There Hugh Toomey, Second Secretary at the Legation, makes regular visits to argue politics and literature with Pasternak - just like Costello.
When he was stationed in Moscow, Costello edited a volume of 20th century Russian poetry published by the Oxford University Press. He regularly met up with Boris Pasternak.
Like Costello, Hugh has been asked by Pasternak to do the English translation of the novel he is working on, Doctor Zhivago, a novel which portrayed the devastation wrought on Russia following the 1917 revolution and which will eventually win Pasternak the Nobel prize for literature and prove a major humiliation for the Soviets.
But Hugh dislikes what he has seen of Zhivago.
So did Costello.
Costello felt the book was a failure as a novel. "The characters exist simply to talk and listen to Doctor Zhivago," he wrote later. "The narrative is as feeble as the character-drawing."
But what irked Costello more was Pasternak's (and his alter ego Zhivago's) lack of enthusiasm for Russian Communism. Responding to Zhivago's famous denunciation of building the Soviet state, that "man is born to live, not to prepare for life," Costello tartly retorts, "To ?live' in the Zhivago sense one must be fortunate enough to possess a decent unearned income," and "Zhivago's conduct is in keeping with his philosophy of life, which includes an unconditional denial of all obligations to society."
Costello saw the Soviet Union as the forward base of the march of history and the Communist Party as its line of supply. According to one report, Pasternak complained of Costello "insisting on every possible and impossible occasion that he should get closer to the Party".
And in the play these are the arguments we hear from Hugh.
And again in the play the phone rings and it's Stalin calling for Pasternak.
But this time it's not the call that Pasternak recounted to Costello, the call about poetic advice; "Stalin needs an envoi for his latest sonnet," might have got an easy laugh but I could see no real payoff in terms of where the play was taking me. So I changed it. I changed it to an earlier call that Stalin made Pasternak. A more lethal call.
In 1934 Lenin had been dead for 10 years and the Soviet Union was in the glacial grip of Stalin. The Party had replaced the people, and the General Secretary the Party. Moscow had become a place of the chill midnight tap on the door.
On an evening in June that year Stalin rang Pasternak and asked if he thought the poet Osip Mandelstam was a genius as Mandelstam had just been arrested and "the Soviet Union does not arrest geniuses". We know from various reported accounts that Pasternak rambled on about how Mandelstam was from a different school of writing to himself but then straightened up and said he needed to talk to Stalin "about love, about life, about death". Stalin went silent, then said something along the lines of, "If it was me getting arrested, I'd hope my friends would stick up for me better." And hung up. And fair enough.
This was the phone call I used in the play, because I thought it gives a better insight into Pasternak, his little vanities and delusions.
Gives an insight into pretty much all writers, really.
Costello's life was compromised by Stalinism. He failed to see Russia's revolution had changed in its class base and character, and carried on as a Stalinist cheer-leader.
But Pasternak was compromised as well. He had supported the revolution in 1917, lost his faith to a considerable degree in the 20s but seemed to believe that all that was needed in the post-revolutionary 30s was some sort of guidance in spiritual values from the top. When that proved impossible, or mistaken, he retreated into art and mystical pronouncements on life and love.
What was needed was a different debate about how we are to live.
Hence the play.
Midnight in Moscow, Maidment Theatre. April 11 to May 4, directed by Colin McColl; Circa Theatre May 11 May to June 8, directed by Susan Wilson.
- ? Fairfax NZ News
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Source: http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/arts/8478959/The-Kiwi-and-the-Kremlin
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Startups around the world are desperate for office space in the San Francisco Bay Area, so tomorrow RocketSpace will announce the lease of a new 50,000 sq ft office so it can house startups with up to 60 employees instead of capping them at 30. Along with this RocketSpace Suites project, the "office-as-a-service" plans to lock down another 100,000 sq ft spot and open a space in London this year.
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Dear Lifehacker,
You're probably familiar with Windows Phone's now-iconic home screen: Instead of multiple screens arranged with rows of icons, it has one home screen called the "Start" screen, with two columns of big tiles that launch apps. You can move these tiles around, resize them, and arrange them in many different ways on the grid. Each tile shows you information (like how many unread SMS messages you have, or your next calendar appointment) so you can always stay up-to-date without having to open an app completely. It doesn't have widgets, but these live tiles are kind of like a halfway point between boring ol' badges and interactive widgets.
Windows Phone disappoints when it comes to notifications. Both iOS and Android have fantastic notification systems, letting you view all your recent notifications from a drawer at the top of your screen. Windows Phone doesn't have this. When you first receive a notification, you'll get a little banner at the top of your screen. Tapping on it will take you to the app in question, but if it disappears before you can tap on it?or if you check your phone later?you won't be able to access those notifications anywhere. You'll be able to see the number of unread messages in all your apps from the live tiles on your home screen, but there isn't one central place where you can get a "roundup" of all your recent notifications, which feels really frustrating after you've gotten used to iOS or Android.
Android and iOS could learn a thing or two from Windows Phone's multitasking abilities. To see your open apps, you just press and hold the back button to view a bunch of thumbnails in a row (kind of like Android's new multitasking system). Tapping on one of those thumbnails resumes the app almost instantaneously. The whole process is extremely smooth.
Email: Windows Phone's email app is pretty basic. After linking your accounts in the Settings app, you can send and receive emails, put them into folders, and flag them. It doesn't have a great conversation view, and viewing other folders takes quite a few taps. It actually feels a little like an older desktop client, and even using Microsoft's awesome Outlook.com service feels like you're using IMAP on a very basic client (which sucks if you're a Gmail user?no archiving here). You can merge all your inboxes into one, if you so choose, which is nice.
Internet Explorer: Internet Explorer puts an emphasis on the site you're viewing rather than buttons and other browser features. This is nice, until you want to do something besides refresh the page or go back (you can't go forward, by the way), because everything is in its menu "drawer." From the menu, you can add sites to your favorites list, view your recent history, and open multiple sites at once in "tabs." You can also pin pages to your start screen and find text on a page, though, which is nice.
So, what do you do when your built-in apps are lackluster? You go to the app store! Unfortunately, you've probably heard about how small a selection Windows Phone has, and it's true. It severely lacks the app selection of iOS or Android. You may find an alternative calendar app or two in the Windows Store, but there aren't any awesome standouts like there are on iOS (or even Android). Most are mediocre, or are missing a lot of features compared to their iOS and Android counterparts. Unlike the other platforms, you don't always have a "good" app for any given category.
That said, I could still see myself recommending this phone to some people. Much like my experiment with Internet Explorer, many of my gripes tend to be a tad more on the "advanced user" side of things. In my eyes, this Windows Phone is less of a smartphone and more of a dumbphone that can surf the web, send emails, and navigate you around town, without all the apps and other stuff you've come to expect. For some people, that's fine?in fact, it's exactly what they need. I'd recommend this to my less tech-obsessed friends that aren't locked into certain apps, or just want a phone that works. If you want something simple and distraction-free, Windows Phone has potential, but if you like Android and iOS, it's going to be difficult to switch. Not impossible by any means, but difficult.