Putin Drear to “ Love and Mr. Lewisham”

Recently, I was reading Timothy Snyder’s historical account, “The Road to Unfreedom” (2018), about Vladimir Putin’s malignant career and likely future bad behavior, now come true. Snyder’s words started to take on more and more prescience every day with the real-time nightly news about Putin’s growing aggressiveness towards Ukraine. This drumbeat news of the day and my bedtime reading of Snyder ran together as end-to-end accounts of what seems to be one story, even dating back to events of a thousand years ago by Putin’s telling. I needed a break.

My bedtime reading switched temporarily to H.G. Wells, one of England’s and my favorite writers of fiction, because of his exceptionally and vividly creative imagination. I interrupted Snyder with “Love and Mr. Lewisham” (1900), a lesser known work by Wells. I already knew well his more often read books, including “The Time Machine” (1895), “The Invisible Man” (1897), “The First Men in the Moon” (2001), and, of course, “The War of the Worlds” (1897 serially), all pioneering works of science fiction, among a large portfolio of works.

We all should appreciate Wells’ creativity from just these book titles, taken especially in the context of years of publication. They were published originally long enough ago that copyrights are expired, and the ebooks are therefore available free from the Gutenberg Project. These are mind stretching books that are great for teens and young adults, as well as adults.

“Love and Mr. Lewisham” is a bit different. It is one of Wells’ earliest novels and is not science fiction. It is a novel of young love, of tests of it under the strain of poverty to the extreme, and aspirations denied by that poverty and partner choice made. It is written in the beautiful, late 19th century prose of H.G. Wells. And he, too, had been once poor, before becoming great.

Putin’s language as described by Timothy Snyder, both the words and that which is projected by covert actions, is that of an autocrat who misreads how greatness comes to a country like his, or to a leader of it. Long lasting and meaningful greatness comes from positive achievements: the classic books of Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Ivan Turgenev. Russian music and ballet, and the poetry, too, of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, so meaningful in a best known work, “Babi Yar.” It begins: “No monument stands over Babi Yar. A drop sheer as a crude gravestone.” Testament to another autocrat, also invading Kyiv.

Anatoly Kuznetsov’s painful, autobiographical, counterpart prose is about his boyhood in a Ukraine invaded by one of the worst “disordered minds” of all, Adolf Hitler.

Vladimir Putin must have forgotten, or never known. He needs to be reminded, if that is even possible, and I would like to be the one to re-introduce him, and the all too many others like him, to a Library. A Library of authors such as these, H.G. Wells and Timothy Snyder, both of whom can be read at once, perhaps for fuller effect, in respect to humanity and inhumanity.