Ozymandias By Percy Bysshe Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Goodbye, Lenin? By SASHA SENDEROVICH DEC. 9, 2013
BOULDER, Colo. — As a child
growing up in the city of Ufa in
the Soviet Union, I was in awe of
the giant statue of Lenin that
stood not far from my
grandmother’s home. Among the
stories she tells there is one that
involves me, aged four or five,
accompanying her to the
cemetery where my
great-grandmother had recently
been buried. When my
grandmother cried, I mistook her
tears over the loss of her mother
for sadness about the obelisk by
the grave: It seemed too small.
Image:​
In December 2013, crowds toppled
a statue of Soviet state founder Vladimir Lenin in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. ​
Go to related Op-Ed piece »​
Credit Maxim
Zmeyev/Reuters
When she died, I assured her, I would commemorate her with a monument as big as Lenin’s.
On Sunday, during the protests in Kiev against President Viktor Yanukovich, the statue of Lenin was
pulled down from its pedestal in front of Besarabsky market. It had been vandalized several days
before and had since been guarded by the riot police. The nationalist party Svoboda took responsibility
for the act. Yuri Syrotiuk, the party’s press secretary and a member of Parliament, called it, “the end of
the Soviet occupation and the beginning of the final decolonization of Ukraine.”
In this interpretation, Lenin is the symbol of Ukraine being brutally integrated into the Soviet Union in
the wake of World War I and then starved by the collectivization policies of his successor, Stalin. Lenin
also stands for contemporary Russia, whose effort to pull Ukraine more firmly into its sphere of
influence — by forcing Mr. Yanukovich not to sign a political and free trade agreement with the
European Union — was the spark for the current protests.
But if you consider that Ukraine has been an independent country for more than two decades, the
toppling of Lenin’s statue carries many more meanings still — including a warning about letting the
euphoria of symbolic gestures stand in for substantive changes in governance and collective mind-sets.
In August 1991, during a failed coup by Soviet hard-liners in Russia, the monument to Felix
Dzerzhinsky, the founder of Communist Russia’s secret police, in front of Moscow’s K.G.B.
headquarters was dismantled. That seemed to signal the end of the Soviet regime. “The Iron Felix” now
rests among other deposed statues in a special park in Moscow. But the security apparatus created by
Dzerzhinsky remains firmly in place, exemplified by President Vladimir Putin and his cronies.
Online, commentators from around the world have been quick to liken the fall of Lenin in Kiev on
Sunday to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989; now, like then, the protesters chipped at both symbolic
structures and hauled away bits as souvenirs. But nearly a quarter-century after that event, the
comparison seems anachronistically nostalgic. If the promise of a unified Europe rang true in 1989, it
seems rather misguided today, given the current economic troubles and rise of right-wing nationalism.
A better parallel may be to the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad in April 2003. In
footage shown around the world, an American soldier placed the star-spangled banner on Saddam’s
iron face as it came down; the gesture was greeted as a harbinger of Iraq’s transition from dictatorship
to democracy. On Sunday, protesters in Kiev placed flags of Ukraine and the European Union on
Lenin’s empty pedestal.
But what exactly did America win in Iraq in 2003? The intervening years tell a far more complicated
story. And what kind of symbolic victory has Europe, its flag replacing Lenin, won in Ukraine today?
Ukraine’s awkward position between Russia’s neo-imperial influence and Europe’s pull promises more
complications ahead. Would closer ties with the European Union — or even Union membership, which
wasn’t promised in the agreement that Mr. Yanukovich failed to sign — bring a democratic and
transparent style of governance and end corruption and oligarchy, as the protesters hope, or would it
turn Ukraine into Europe’s service economy, as some critics have cautioned?
Destroying statues to shed a cumbersome historical legacy often simply opens the way for the creation
of new symbols. A more effective way for a nation to emancipate itself from the past may be to subvert
existing symbols that are already integrated into the fabric of urban life.
In July 1967, the artists Leonid Lamm and Igor Gelbakh threw bottles of red paint at the statue of the
poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in one of Moscow’s central squares. Mayakovsky was an avant-garde poet,
and the two artists felt that the Soviet state had wrongly appropriated his legacy, in part by erecting a
monument to him in the style of Socialist Realism. For a few hours that summer morning, as
municipal workers scrubbed away at the red paint, the public space of a Moscow square became a site
for re-evaluating the state’s aesthetic and political practices.
The granite Lenin of Kiev was already on its way to representing the complexities of both the past and
today: It was a reminder of the failure of the Soviet project and of the failure of the liberal economic
policies that followed. Having survived two decades since the fall of the Soviet Union, the statue was
treated by many residents of Kiev as a potent visual pun. It stood in front of the Besarabsky covered
food hall — a structure plastered with glitzy ads for European banks and merchandise — and was
dubbed the “Lenin who shows the way to the market.”
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Reading and Reacting to Poetry Pairings
1. Why do you think this poem was paired with this photo and article from The Times? What do the
three have in common? How well do you think they work together?
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2. If the poem in this pairing is a classic, why do you think people still read it? If it is a contemporary
poem, do you think it has the potential to become something people will still read 100 years from now?
Why or why not?
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3. What other articles, photographs or works of film, literature or fine art could also have been paired
with this poem? Why?
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Comparing Two or More Texts
Directions: Use the questions below to help you think about the relationship between two or more
texts of any kind. Use the back of the sheet if you need more room to write.
Content: In your own words, what is each text saying?
TEXT #1
TEXT #2
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Similarities:​
How are these texts similar, connected or related? How are they alike, whether in terms
of subject matter, theme, purpose, tone, etc.? What specific lines and details echo each other or
connect?
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Differences​
: How are the two different—again, in terms of subject matter, theme, purpose, tone or
anything else? Where do they “disagree”?
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The Two Texts Together: ​
How does reading the two together make you see or understand things
you might not if you read them separately? If the creators or subjects of these texts were to have a
conversation, what is one thing they might say to each other?
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Questions and Reactions: ​
What questions do these texts and their content raise for you? What
reactions do you have to them, either individually or together?
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