BYRON HONOURED

Wairarapa Times-Age, 28 July 1938, Page 4

BYRON HONOURED

ADOPTED BY SOVIET RUSSIA. GREAT CELEBRATIONS. Soviet Russia has now .adopted Lord Byron, and during the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth there were great celebrations all over the Union. Organised with the finesse and thoroughness typical of Soviet economic or political propaganda campaigns, the celebrations were carried into remote villages and hamlets where, only two decades ago, most of the illiterate peasants, and even their “kulak” masters, had never even seen a printed book. Recently, thousands of paid lecturers and unpaid “social workers" were sent out from the towns to workers’ and peasants’ club houses in outlying regions where "literary evenings” were arranged to spread the fame of England’s ■‘rebel poet.” In Leningrad, the Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences held a special session to commemorate Byron’s memory. Papers on his life and work were read before large audiences of Russia’s literary elite. Professor Zhirmundsky spoke on “Byron and Our Times”; Professor Piksanov on “Byron and Russian Literature.” Special sessions were held by leading universities of the country and by the powerful Union of Soviet Writers, which maintains a vigilant watch to prevent “hostile theories” from finding their way into Soviet literature. Soviet literary critics have made it eminently clear that the official “approval” of Byron is based chiefly on his rebellious life and his great influence upon Russia’s poets, Pushkin and Lermontov. Particular stress is being laid on Byron’s fiery maiden speech in the House of Lords in defence of the weavers of Nottingham, his participation in the conspiracies 'of the Italian Carbonari, and his death in Greece while aiding that country in its struggle for independence from Turkey. There is quite a boom in Byron's works. In all, some 300,000 volumes of Byron’s poetry have been published during the two decades. of the Soviet regime, as compared with only 3000 during the twenty years before 1917. Editions have been brought out in Ukrainian, Georgian, Armenian, Jewish and other languages.