‘THOSE evening bells, those evening bells, /How many a tale their music tells, /Of youth and home and that sweet time/ When last I heard their soothing chime.” Thus sang the Irish Ambassador. He is in a typically untidy stonemason’s yard in an industrial suburb of St Petersburg among some arresting images.
There’s a bust of Lenin, complete with worker’s cap, some 5ft in height. Despite its size and its position among discarded masonry, it is unmistakably him.
Further on lies a big plain sculpture of two workers, male and female, again much larger than life, depicted in the pose so familiar of the period, with their gaze set on a glorious horizon. The bottom of the sculpture, the legs, lie nearby. Put together it would stand 10ft tall.
Further on there is a head of Alexander Pushkin on a plinth, and cast aside is a bust of a distinguished-looking fellow with longish hair who has a remarkable resemblance to the late Charles Haughey.
When the sculptor is asked who this might be he tells the Irish group, “Oh, he’s a local bandit. It was done for a headstone”.
Centre stage is a life-size head of the poet and song writer Thomas Moore. It is in interlaced bronze and set in a shamrock-shaped granite stone with the words from
Those Evening Bellsinscribed alongside. It is this work of art, still in progress, that the Irish, led by the Ambassador to Moscow, Philip McDonagh, have come to view. It has been commissioned from the sculptor Dimitri Zaminker by the Irish consul in St Petersburg, Anatoly Shashin. It will be unveiled by McDonagh at its permanent site in the Philological Courtyard of the University of St Petersburg on June 15th when the event will tie in with a literary/Bloomsday weekend in the Nabokov Museum in the city.
The group in the yard, which included Maureen Beary Ryan who organised the visit to Russia by nearly 30 members of the Friends of the National Gallery of Ireland, listened as the sculptor explained how he was working from photographs of Moore and how he decided on the shamrock shape.
Moore is extremely well regarded in Russia. Even today. Every schoolchild, we were told, is familiar with Those Evening Bells, translated into Russian, and no one can believe that the author is not Russian.
Dr Zhivago played the melody on a balalaika in a station scene in the film of that name. McDonagh, a well- known poet himself, sang the song in English to mark the occasion and Tatiana, a guide with connections with the centre for Irish Studies at the University, sang it in Russian to the appreciative audience in the incongruous setting of the sculptor’s yard.
A WB Yeats exhibition is being planned and, to further literary connections between Ireland and Russia, the Embassy in Moscow and the Irish Literature Exchange last year published a pamphlet, Thomas Moore Erin! The Tear and the Smile in Thine Eyes, with Russian translations of many of Moore's poetic writings.
In an introduction essay, McDonagh wrote that in the 20th century Ireland had Nobel literature winners Yeats, Heaney and Beckett and it is easy to forget that in the preceding century Ireland’s national poet and most successful writer was Thomas Moore.
Moore as a young man, McDonagh writes, had close friends in idealistic political circles. “He remained deeply aware ever afterwards of the political situation in Ireland, even if he avoided confrontation. We may surmise that Moore’s literary work was his peaceful contribution to Irish literary revival.”
Moore's melodies, writes McDonagh, were learned by heart in many countries and in time inspired composers such as Schumann, Glinka, Mendelssohn and Britten. At one point Edgar Allan Poe identified him as the most famous poet in the world. He even influenced the choice of the harp as the emblem of the independent Irish state. While he is big in Russia, he is not forgotten in his native land. The melody we know as Oft in the Stilly Night, with words by Moore, was played for Queen Elizabeth II during her recent Dublin visit.
But Moore is not the only Dubliner of great note in St Petersburg, and McDonagh mentions this in his essay too.
As you stride down the renowned Nevsky Prospekt you encounter a plaque to the composer John Field which states he was the most celebrated pianist in Moscow in the 19th century and made Russia his second home.
As for the sculptures of Lenin and the peasant/worker couple, he in a cap, she in a headscarf, in the stonemason’s yard, these and others are remnants of the Soviet era. They were commissioned but unclaimed and have lay abandoned in the yard since the late 1980s. Nobody wants them now. Unlike Moore, their time has past.