[Carl Copeland]

Writer Ludmila Stern once heard angry shouts coming from the courtyard of the building where she worked in Leningrad. She looked out the window and saw Joseph Brodsky and Anatoly Naiman, a poet and Akhmatova’s personal secretary, engaged in an altercation by a ping pong table. Brodsky knocked Naiman to the ground. Stern ran outside in time to hear this: “‘People experience fear of death because of their alienation from God,’ yelled Joseph, banging Naiman’s head on the table. ‘It’s a result of our isolation, abandonment and total aloneness. Why can’t you understand such an elementary thing?’”

[Jim Moonan]

.
Wow.
The recounting of this exchange is so good I want to read the next 400 pages of this yet-to-be-written Russian masterpiece. Working title: "The Kettle Is Black".

The ping pong table serves as a hilariously serious place to have such an philosophical fracas. It reaches into the absurd. It's an argument that Godot can only settle if Godot would only show. Didi and Gogo never dreamed of such a thing.

I don't know where you want this discussion to go, but I thought I would lead it down this path toward futility Don't go bashing my head on the ping pong table for doing it.
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[RCL]

Interesting bit about the Poets of Pain Pong.

[Carl Copeland]

I just happened on a little article called “Five Fights between Russian Poets.” The only other one of passing interest is a fist fight between Yesenin and Pasternak—must have been in the early 1920s. Yesenin disliked Pasternak and his poetry and picked a fight with him. Nothing out of the ordinary for Yesenin, who was a raging drunk, though he looked like an angel. I didn’t really intend this to go anywhere, Jim, but futility is fine with me.

[Sarah-Jane Crowson]

Excellent story.

Hmm. Poetic disagreement as powerful oratory and/or bare-knuckle boxing. This is the stuff of which games are made (and serious injuries, so let's not even think about experimenting, even with avatars).

I did some very lightweight digging and found out that Ben Jonson (English Playwright) killed actor Gabriel Spenser in a duel.

On a lighter note, Brittanica shares that:

In 1870 Édouard Manet took offense over art critic Louis Edmond Duranty’s review of two of his paintings. Upon encountering him at a café, Manet slapped Duranty, and the two men agreed to duel. They elected to use swords, and Émile Zola served as Manet’s second. Duranty was wounded in the chest, at which point it was decided that Manet’s honor had been restored.

So, if anyone is feeling ill-used by poor reviews...

Sarah-Jane

[Carl Copeland]

Fascinating, Sarah-Jane. And of course we all know what Verlaine did to Rimbaud. I did a little digging too and found a duel between two Russian poets over another poet. In 1909 Nikolai Gumilev had a virtual love affair with the mysterious Baroness Cherubina de Gabriak, whose poems he had read in a journal. He wrote her passionate love letters and received passionate replies. The baroness turned out to be a disabled schoolteacher named Elisaveta Dmitrieva who had been helped in inventing her persona and getting published by the poet Maximilian Voloshin. Gumilev felt he had been humiliated by Voloshin and provoked a duel. One of his seconds was Mikhail Kuzmin, poet and author of Russia’s first gay novel. They faced off, armed with Pushkin-era pistols, in the spot where Pushkin had been fatally wounded over seventy years earlier. Kuzmin couldn’t bear to watch and hid his eyes. Gumilev shot and missed. Voloshin misfired and later said he simply didn’t know how to shoot. Thankfully, they let it go at that. Five months later, Gumilev married Anna Akhmatova.

[Ann Drysdale]

I wonder what it was, then, that Gumilev had "loved" in Cherubina?

I wonder, too, if the duel really did end there or whether, in latching onto Akhmatova, he took it upon himself to do what Volushin had done to his Countess in a sort of retrospective "sucks-boo!" We shall never know.

[Carl Copeland]

Originally Posted by Ann Drysdale

I wonder what it was, then, that Gumilev had "loved" in Cherubina?

I suppose Gumilev fell in love with the whole romantic persona that she and Voloshin had concocted: a beautiful and reclusive baroness with a dark secret in her past—and a gifted poet. We can forgive Gumilev for feeling deceived, but sadly, Dmitrieva’s readers lost interest as well. Some have claimed that Voloshin was the author or co-author of her poems, but I think scholars today are inclined to believe that she was a genuinely gifted poet.

[Sarah-Jane Crowson]

It's both a wondrous and deeply sad story. Perhaps mainly about Marketing, and bias of many kinds.

It led me to another imaginary poet, Ern Malley

This one less about marketing and more about bias, possibly.

Sarah-Jane

[Carl Copeland]

Originally Posted by Sarah-Jane Crowson

... It led me to another imaginary poet, Ern Malley

Thanks, Sarah-Jane. Literary hoaxes are another fascinating topic. Ossian’s epic poems were an international sensation in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and Chatterton brilliantly impersonated a 15th-century poet when he was barely in his teens! The Ern Malley hoaxers were so good they even fooled themselves.