Distant voices.(THE STRAGGLER)(Voices of History)(Sound recording review)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

'TOVARISHCHI! Grazhdanye! Bratya i syostri! Boitsy nashei armii i flota! K'vam obrashschayus ya, druzya moi ..."

One listens in fascination to the man's recorded voice, then goes to one's books. Edvard Radzinsky: "On July 3 Stalin at last made his long-awaited appeal to the people: 'Comrades! Citizens! Brothers and sisters! Warriors of the army and the fleet! I call upon you, my friends ...'" That was eleven days after Hitler's attack on the USSR in 1941; days that Stalin, according to Molotov, spent in a state of "paralysis." The Wehrmacht had easily punched through Stalin's forward defenses and was deep in Russian territory.

Ivan Maisky tells us that the speech was not a success, being delivered in "a dull colorless voice" with Stalin "often stopping and breathing heavily." The recording confirms this. The despot was not at his oratorical best. One imagines the boitsy of the armii and flota--those not already slaughtered in the preceding eleven days, or rounded up for shipment to hellish POW camps (400,000 prisoners taken at Minsk alone)--listening in dismay, thinking to themselves, though of course not saying out loud: "This is our nation's leader?"

Stalin's speech is one of many historical sound snippets I have been listening to since seeing an ad in the London magazine The Literary Review. The ad offered selections from the sound archive of the British Library, in CD format at modest prices. I bought three items. Stalin's voice comes from the first: a two-disc "Voices of History" set, which also includes Trotsky (speaking in English), Lenin, and Hitler, along with a host of other 20th-century notables and a couple of 19th-century ones: Florence Nightingale and W. E. Gladstone, recorded in 1890 and 1888 respectively. My second item was a CD containing five radio recordings of Evelyn Waugh; my third, one of poets reading their own work.

The poets are a mixed bag. From the British Library CD one could fairly deduce that, as a general rule, poets ought to be forbidden by law to read their verses out loud, with FINES DOUBLED (as highway signs say) if the poet attempts to sing his productions, as Hilaire Belloc and Edith Sitwell both do. I don't mind Sitwell, whose poems I never cared about, but Belloc's "Tarantella" is an old favorite of mine. To hear the poet himself singing it very incompetently is distressing, especially when, as my mother used to say disapprovingly of Elvis Presley, "the man can't even enunciate properly."

The poetry selections are unbalanced, too. Forty-five seconds of Kipling and 48 of Robert Frost, then seven minutes of Ezra Pound? The old fraud's comrade in fraudulence, T. S. Eliot, gets seven and a half to tell us about his wretched yellow fog rubbing its back on the darn window panes--one of the clumsiest, most strained metaphors in the history of published verse. And, passing from mere pretentiousness to rank gibberish, here is nearly four minutes of Gertrude Stein--three and a half more than any human being ever wanted.